Sunday 7 September 2014

Review: Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

Paranormal Activity 4
IMDB rate: 4,5
Genre: Found Footage, Ghost

The Paranormal Activity movies are a pretty big hype the last couple of years and well, the franchise grew quite fast since the first release. At the moment there are five Paranormal Activity movies and I believe a sixth one is also coming. I watched the first three movies and today I watched the fourth one, two years after it release. It's actually the first Paranormal Activity movie that I haven't seen in the cinema, which should give you an idea what my thoughts were about the third movie. The fifth movie, The Marked Ones, doesn't seem good at all and I'm not even sure if I will ever watch that one.

This is actually my first Paranormal Activity review, simply because I didn't write reviews yet when I watched the first three movies. But here's a quick overview of my thought about the first three movies! I liked the first movie, it was somewhat refreshing at the time and it made found footage movies popular again. I think I liked the second one even more, it was actually one of the few movies (besides Mars Attacks and Donnie Darko) that gave me nightmares. I hated the third one, it was just dumb and only gave a bit more information about why it all happened to these girls. Also, everything that appeared in the trailer did absolutely not appear in the movie itself, important things such as the fire. 


Now, the fourth Paranormal Activity movie. I did not hate it, but I didn't like it either. I didn't like it because it was simply a more boring copy of the first movie. They threw in a few new techniques to show what happened but other than that it was just exactly the same. Instead of installing cameras all over the house, they now let their webcams of their laptops film the entire day. And it even does this apparently when the power is off? Also, these people never close their laptops and even their kid has a laptop with a very good camera. 

The scares are all the same, only more mild this time. Throwing people in the air to knock them out, removing their blankets and dragging them across the room. We've seen these things in all three movies already and it's predictable and frankly, not very scary anymore. The only new thing in this movie was the addition of the Kinect. It gave a very cool vision of dots all over the room when night vision was turned on, this was especially cool when the kid Wyatt walks downstairs and you see something follow him. It looked a bit fake but it was a nice thought I think. Also, I thought the cat was a cool addition, it caused a few unpredictable scares. I did think they would make use of the cat more though.

I must say that I was thankful that the subtitles described the noises that these people heard because I had my volume turned up pretty loud and I still couldn't hear a thing that they apparently heard. So when I read [thumping noise upstairs] I at least knew why they stood up and asked 'who is there?'.

In every Paranormal Activity movie there does not happen a thing in the first half of the movie, I kinda expected the same thing with this movie, only still nothing happened when the first half had passed. Or well, I think it's better to say that nothing new or interesting happened. Not only until the very end of this movie something new happened, and that was literally in the last ten seconds. These last ten seconds definitely did not cause a 'WOW' effect with me, it more caused a 'WTF is this shit' effect, I think. You know what happened? Out of nowhere there comes a mass of angry (possessed?) woman towards the camera and when the camera turns around we see a very scary Katie. That's it. This mass of woman had absolutely not been mentioned in the entire movie, and I really have no idea where the fuck they came from and what their entire purpose was for this ending. 


I also don't really get the storyline, Katie moves in next door with this weird scary kid named Robbie, and I figured he was Hunter since Katie kidnapped Hunter at the end of part 2. But this Robbie kid is just someone and I actually have no idea where the fuck he came from. This Hunter kid apparently is Wyatt, who apparently was adopted. But that's all the information we get about it. We have no idea how he got away from Katie and got with this new family. And this is only how I interpreted it, I'm probably all wrong, since this doesn't make any sense. 

Paranormal Activity 4 was pretty boring and absolutely not scary. It's definitely the least good one, since it's illogical as fuck. I literally have no idea what suddenly was going on in this movie, but they will probably tell us in the next movie.. or not, whatever. The movie is predictable and only changed slightly from the previous installment. There's nothing bad to say about the acting or anything, but there is about the rest of this movie. I enjoyed part 1 and 2, but after that things of course became a mess. 

My personal rate: 4/10

No comments:

Post a Comment

You might also like..