To varying degrees, I still very much dig the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY films, but I think the franchise runners have taken this storyline to its logical conclusion, and anything beyond this will seem superfluous and a like a sad cash-grab. By finally giving us the backstory on sisters Katie and Kristi Rey (troubles that were referencing in the first film pretty explicitly), we don't really need to see the girls as tweens or PARNORMAL ACTIVITY: THE COLLEGE YEARS. With Part 3, we get that these girls' lives were pretty much fucked from day one and that what happened to them as adults was fated.
PA3 opens closer to the present day, in the days right after Katie (Katie Featherston, from the first film) has moved into her place. She comes with boxes of video tapes, asking to store them in Kristi's (Sprague Grayden) basement. But as they examine the tapes, they notice that many are labeled "September 1988." It's a simple, clean starting point, and what comes next is watching the girls (played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown), their mother Julie (Lauren Bittner), and stepfather/mom's boyfriend (I might have missed the relationship) Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith), who just happens to run a wedding video business and has easy access to multiple video cameras, surveillance equipment, an endless supply of tapes, and an editing bay. Lucky us.
PA3 has a bit more of a slow-burn lead time than the first two films, but that didn't bother me much. I actually liked getting to know these characters. And while the girls are young, they have distinct enough personalities that it feels like this film has four fully formed characters to get to know, not to mention a babysitter (featured in one of the movie's scariest sequences involving someone playing ghost with a sheet over their head), Julie's nosy mother, and Dennis' friend Randy (Dustin Ingram), who helps examine hours of footage taken from cameras in two bedrooms and the kitchen/dining room area. Dennis decides such surveillance is necessary when small, strange things start happening and weird little noises sound during the night.
Naturally, one of the daughters has an imaginary friend, who, it turns out, might not be so imaginary, and by the end of the film, we have a very clear understanding of what has been going on in this movie and the two that came before it, which is both interesting and not necessarily a good thing. I tend to reject any attempt at explaining where scary things come from. The very fact that they seem so random makes them all the more terrifying. I liked the general idea that these girls are cursed; knowing where that curse originated doesn't add anything to my appreciation of the original ideas.
That being said, PA3 scared the bejesus out of me several times, and it features its unseen evil force as a much more aggressive, attack-mode being than in the other two films. As with PA2, this latest installment has trouble sticking the landing, and it features what might be the most ludicrous and unnecessary ending I could imagine involving the family moving in with grandma. But I tend not to bury a film just because I hated the ending.
What I truly liked about PA3 are the authenticity of the child actors playing the sisters. There is nothing fake or stagey about them, and all I could think about was how directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (CATFISH) extracted these great performances from these girls. The "Bloody Mary" sequence (which is not the same scene we see in one of the early trailers) is so convincing, I started to get mad at the filmmakers for putting these kids in danger.
Yes, of course, some of the camera angles and "captured" footage seems a little too convenient, not to mention that these events take place in a home filled with camera equipment. But when the screen fades to black and fades back in on the words "Night 1," my hands went immediately just above my eyes, getting ready to brace myself for the evening's first of many jolts. Joost and Schulman do a admirable job setting up a few false scares, but when the time comes for the real ones, they prove themselves experts as timing, pacing, and makes us jump at the slightest sound or movement. There's one scene in particular, set in the kitchen, that made me freak out so severely, I almost punched the guy next to me in a "Did you see that?" attack.
I get it, some of you are big boys and girls who don't get scared or don't like the modest pace of the PARANOMAL ACTIVITY movies. You need music to tell you to be scared, cats or birds popping out of doors and windows to get your blood racing, loads of gore to let you know that something horrible is happening. And I love those things too; I'm not knocking them. But sometimes I love to be reminded that it's so much easier to scare me in the real world than in the movies, and PA3 continues the tradition of doing just that.
These movies freak me out because they don't have music, noticeable effects, or creatures running around. It's about the darkness, the creeping chill, the waiting. If you've been loving the ride so far, you'll have not problem slipping right back into that comfort zone. If you've never liked or seen these films before, I still think PA3 has enough going for it to entertain all comers. What else are you going to see this weekend, THE THREE MUSKETEERS? Don't make me laugh.
