Tom Petty was right – the waiting is, indeed, the hardest part. Paranormal Activity 3 involves much waiting, some neat effects, more waiting, and then an ending that delivers just what we expect, but not what we need. It is no shocker. Unfortunately this year we have no Saw film to look forward to, the later editions achieved the power of South Park, allowing Jigsaw to take out his aggressions on what was plaguing the national zeitgeist.
Paranormal Activity 3 could more accurately be called Paranormal Activity: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, it begins with what we may think of as the first haunting, an origin tale for Katie and her sister Kristi. Kristi and family were the subject of Tod Williams’ Paranormal Activity 2, which my biggest takeaway was annoyance when it felt like 30% of the film was a static shot of an automated pool cleaner performing its task in the middle of the night.
If Williams is (based on his prior filmography) interested in perverse family units, Paranormal Activity 2 should have been more fun and interesting than it was – using this same logic, Paranormal 3 assumes recording our every waking moment isn’t something new. It’s just that in the 1980’s we weren’t uploading it Facebook and YouTube. Paranormal 3 filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman made the fascinating and problematic Catfish, which was riveting primarily because we don’t know where it’s going, and where it lands was unexpected. Paranormal Activity 3 delivers exactly what it promises: cheap thrills and things that go bump in the night as recorded first hand and then “found” later.
How greedy can one studio be? The first film was essentially found in someone’s desk drawer, released slowly and digitally at midnight and when it found success opened wide. The second, avoiding the perceived shortcomings of the Blair Witch Project 2: Book of Shadows and attempted to deliver what the first film did not. And here in lies the problem: recent remakes, including both sequels to Paranormal Activity and The Hangover: Part 2 – they are essentially remakes of the first films. Paranormal Activity 3 doesn’t raise the stakes, we know it’s coming, and we grow bored waiting.
The film opens in 2005 – some 3 years before the events we first learn of concerning Katie (Katie Featherston) and her boyfriend Micah, as Katie visits her sister Kristi Rey (Sprague Grayden). The film then takes us back to 1988 when Katie and Kristi were young girls playing the creepy Teddy Ruxpin doll (that despite being sweet and enduring seemed possessed – here’s a missed opportunity). They live with their mother Julie (Lauren Bittner) and her boyfriend Dennis (Christopher Nicolas Smith) who is a wedding videographer. As expected, Dennis wires the house with VHS cameras after suspecting paranormal activity, discovered when he and Julie attempt to make a sex tape and are interrupted by an earthquake.
In the logic of the big picture, should Katie in the first film have stopped Micah from replicating what Dennis once did? Then again she did mention this type of thing ran in her family in the first film, but here we see it play out. Much of what works in films purporting to be constructed of found footage is that what we don’t see scares us. The more we learn about Katie, the less interesting the first film seems.
There is room for a forth, especially with the reported box office numbers from its sneak preview showings. Hiring Joost and Schulman isn’t a bad idea – Catfish was a film that got under my skin, Paranormal Activity 3 just gave me a headache. Perhaps if they really want to creep out the core audience on multiple levels they could hire Joe Swanberg to write, direct and star (as a creepy teaching assistant or RA) the sequel, which would have Katie go off to college. The last two Paranormal films have just been pure boredom until you’re woken up by a loud thump or something off in the corner. Good luck staying awake if you go at midnight – I was growing tired at my 7:30PM show.
Paranormal Activity 3 is now in wide release.