The silliest of franchises - the cinematic equivalent of paying to watch your kitchen and someone popping up and shouting 'BOO!' every twenty minutes - reaches its third (annual) installment and scores the biggest horror opening ever in the USA. Apart from a self-conscious near-contemporary prologue to bring in the two supernaturally-hounded sisters and set up the VHS-taped found-footage conceit, this film is set in 1988 and attempts to show what happened in their childhood that led up to numbers 1 and 2. In its favour, Paranormal Activity 3 is more playful and slightly less clinical than its predecessors, and the scarce subsidiary characters are better served, but this film follows the franchise's own conventions and visual/aural language to the letter and therefore does little to either shock or surprise. The last ten minutes, however - in a desperate attempt to explain the series - is an extraordinary grab-bag of Blair Witch, Poltergeist and Halloween 6, which not only undermines the sisters' stories in the previous two films but also shows how ridiculous the concept has become.
2 comments:
Not that I've watched any of these films but can't help but notice these are the Catfish guys... That's a weird career move!
I think the producers were hoping for that same balance of realism and story-telling in Para 3...never mind....
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