Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
Directed by Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
Written by Christopher Landon
Starring Katie Featherston, Lauren Bittner, Chris Smith
Release Date October 21st, 2011
Published October 21st, 2011
If you have seen one Paranormal Activity movie, you've seen all three Paranormal Activity movies. Yes, the characters are different in each movie but the style and the general set up and execution are pretty much the same.
Paranormal Activity 3 is dressed up as a prequel intended to shed light on how the sister characters from 1 & 2, played by Sprague Graydon and Katie Featherston, ended up as targets of evil spirits but the prequel aspect doesn't really matter much; if you can really tell which sister was in which movie you care much more than I did.
The bottom line is that the set up and execution is the same for each of the movies. Cameras are trained on a home where strange things keep happening. Cameras are pointed at the beds of family members, as well as in the living room and kitchen.
Long stretches of film pass with nothing happening until something seems to move. More time passes and the movements become more noticeable. Finally, a crash is heard and something potentially deathly happens as the audience leaps in their seats.
The set up worked in the first '"Paranormal Activity" movie because of the novelty of director Oren Peli's no budget approach. "Paranormal Activity 2" however, exposed the holes in this premise and added the hoary concept of a child in danger.
"Paranormal Activity 3" wears out the welcome of this once novel approach to horror filmmaking in the first 30 minutes of the movie. Irksome characters standing in for the mother (Lauren Bittner) of the two sisters, Katie and Kristi, from the first two films, played as children by Jessica Tyler Brown and Chloe Csengery, and the mother's boyfriend (Christopher N. Smith), are no different from the characters troubled in the first two films.
The boyfriend carries his camera everywhere he goes for no other reason than the plot requires it. He sets up cameras throughout the house and with no surprise whatsoever causes friction with his girlfriend, even as the cameras clearly capture the ghostly presence that is wreaking havoc throughout the house.
If there is one modest innovation in "Paranormal Activity 3" it is a rotating camera jerry-rigged onto a rotating fan base. As the camera pans between the kitchen and living room we know that it will reveal something terrifying eventually and the slow turn of the camera is an effective piece of suspense until it too wears out its welcome.
"Paranormal Activity 3" is yet another in a long line of cynical cash grabs that don't even have the decency to hide their commercial intentions behind even low rent entertainment. The modest scares of "Paranormal Activity 3" rarely rise to the level of those in the first film, mostly because they're basically reruns.
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