Curious Activity...

Paranormal Activity 3

I’m not quite sure what makes me afraid of the movies in the Paranormal Activity series but I think it is the anticipation of the next scare. I always expect something horrific around the next pan of the camera and sometimes I am right. So when I went to see Paranormal Activity 3 a few weeks ago, I was terrified at what awaited me around the next corner. After all, this is the one where we find out how the activity began. 

The first 2 movies, which in case you didn’t know (SPOILER ALERT) were filmed in reverse order. So the events of Paranormal Activity 2 were set before the events in the original Paranormal Activity. Now comes the 3rd movie in the series and again we go further back in time to 1988 and a simpler time. Apparently a time where cameras still had night vision but long before Paris Hilton made night vision well night vision. In the first Paranormal Activity, we watched how “Katie” let her boyfriend Micah film them in a non-Hilton way as their lives seemed to be taken over by a supernatural force. In Part 2, we switched to Katie’s sister Kristi who has similarly bad incidents at her house until sending the “curse” to Micah (pronounced for those not in the know as Mee-ca) and Katie in Part 1. Katie gets her revenge for that sisterly betrayal but now we travel well back in time to see the beginnings of the problems.

I guess the problem I have with this movie is that when the activity began, it wasn’t as scary as the later. Yes the same gags are there as a child plays with her uber-demonic imaginary friend Toby. Her parents are charmed and smiley laughing about their daughter having the most normal of childhood things. Yet Kristi is actually seeing the one who will eventually destroy her family. There is no hope for the adults in this picture and you just hope that the collateral people get out of the way before Toby gets angry. I remember in the commercials I was shown a mysterious shadow woman who seems to haunt the family. Yet strangely the most effective scenes from the trailer don’t show up in the movie. Why a movie company would specifically show you footage that is not in the movie, I do not know. 

I mean I actually had to cover my eyes when the trailer came on and Kristi and Katie played “Bloody Mary” in the bathroom with nothing but a red dot of the camera showing on the screen. Never shows up in the movie. Kristi jumping from a ledge in the middle of the night and appearing unharmed moments later... I’m not ruining the movie for you because it isn’t in there. I think with a found footage movie, you should never cut out anything that appears in the trailers. Otherwise it is cleverly edited “found footage” and it take you out of the movie. 

I don’t want to say that the movie is not scary. I was still crouched down in my chair, plugging my ears and not wanting to see what was going on. In my previous review of a “found footage” movie, Megan is Missing, I was most impressed with the simplicity in which the film was presented. This movie seems more deliberate. It is telling a story and the footage is secondary to the action. The gimmick is not used to sell the story and what happens to Paranormal Activity 3 is that it seems to be more a movie than a movie with found footage. 

The Paranormal Activity series may have bled out and while the movie is scary, it is also lacking in the very things that made it innovative. Maybe this is the result of overexposure to these types of movies. Like when The Blair Witch Project became more about the snot in the girl’s nose than why Mikey was standing in the corner at the end. I don’t know what to say. I liked the movie, I was scared and it satisfied my adrenaline needs. So why did I feel let down? I don’t know.

To that end...

Mr. Unhappy sez: I’m not sure why you want to see this movie but I don’t know why not.