Not Worth the Wait

Around five months ago, I wrote that I was planning to see Paranormal Activity 3, but saving the experience for a dark night at home for (hopefully) maximum effect. Now that the movie is available on Blu-ray, that time has come.

If I did achieve maximum effect in not going to the theater, I sort of hate to think how I would have felt had I actually gone. To call the movie a disappointment is overstating the matter, since I probably wasn't truly expecting that much from it. But I was hoping for better, I suppose, and didn't get it.

The first Paranormal Activity was a bit of a gimmick, but a very effective and well-realized one. The second film was a bit of a re-tread, but had a very novel way of linking to the first movie that ultimately made it an enjoyable experience. This third installment, though, smells a bit too much of "been there, done that."

The story takes us back to the late 1980s, to the childhood of the two women in the first two movies. It apparently runs in the family that the boyfriend likes to tape things, and so we see footage of an earlier "haunting" surrounding these girls at a young age. And while the opening moments of the movie explain how these tapes came to be "lost" and unseen by the adult women (thus providing an explanation for how the first two movies could even come to pass), it's rather impossible to explain -- after you see how the movie ends -- why the tapes even survived and weren't destroyed.

But okay, let's say you agree to check that logic at the door. (These movies already ask that, to a certain extent, in demanding you not question why the characters wouldn't at some point just put the camera down.) Then you're left with a bump-in-the-night movie where too many of the scares are cribbed straight from the earlier installments. You get the "person pulled out of bed by an invisible force" moment, the "someone stands by the bed and watches someone sleep for hours straight" moment. The one original contribution to the mix here is a "panning camera" gag that involves a makeshift rotary fan turned into a camera mount that pans methodically between two rooms, allowing for a few clever "what's happening while we can't see it??!!" moments.

The truth is, if you liked either of the first two movies, you really couldn't dislike this movie. They're all just too similar. And if you've never seen any of these movies? Well, this third installment might be as good a place to start as any. My suspicion is that whichever Paranormal Activity movie you watched first would be your favorite. But to see a new one churned out every year in time for Halloween? There's not much juice left in this particular piece of fruit. I rate number three a C.