Movie Review- So, Where’s All This Activity That’s Supposed to be in ‘Paranormal Activity 4’?

April Barkley

WCB Movie Writer

Director- Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Studio- Room 101
Starring- Katie Featherston, Kathryn Newton,
Brady Allen
Rating- 1.5 out 4 stars

The now famous paranormal movie franchise has released their newest movie: Paranormal Activity 4. This series is starting to feel like the Saw movies. They keep making more and more but downgrading on the scares. The first couple Paranormal Activity movies were awesome. They were scary, had great plots, and made you excited for the next installment.

Five years ago, Katie and Hunter disappeared. In the new movie, a new family witnesses strange events in their neighborhood and in their home when a woman and a mysterious and weird child move in.

Teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) starts to notice weird occurrences in her home and has boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) set up cameras to capture all the activity, or lack thereof. After the mother of the weird child has to be taken to the hospital, the weird kid lives with Alex, her mom, dad, and little brother. After that, unexplainable things start to happen.

It takes a long time for the story to get going and once it does, it never actually uncovers answers from previous films and uses a lot of the same plot points and the same “paranormal activity” like doors opening, clocks stopping; they needed to spice it up! It’s a little scary that they couldn’t be a little more creative. The first two films scared people. It made us jump; even the smallest movement or quietest sound terrified us, which made the films so special, but the makers of Paranormal Activity 4 forgot that and did a shotty job with storytelling.

But, I can’t totally bash the film because a few scenes did make me jump and had me on the edge of my seat. The weird boy was totally creepy too. The classic scene where someone is sleeping and a black shadow of a person is watching them sleep happens in Paranormal Activity 4 and that was spooky as hell! So, while it’s more bad news than good, it did deliver a little fright during the Halloween season.

We all got spoiled with Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 and of course, there will be a fifth installment so hopefully they can get back into the horror film mindset and make a memorable film. Just be prepared to buy the bucket of popcorn, you’ll be more interested in eating.