Plenty Of Room For Activities

Year: 2015

Director: Gregory Plotkin

Cast: Chris J. Murray, Brit Shaw, Ivy George

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So, here we are. The final Paranormal Activity film. A landmark franchise is finally departing us… Ha! I couldn’t even get through that. Yeah, let’s wait to see the box office receipts before we pull the plug on that gold mine. If there’s one thing I learned from being a student of Jason Voorhees, it’s that pulling the “Final” card actually increases your chances of making another sequel. People eat that crap up and producers just can’t say no to nostalgic profit margins. Even if your movie is technically a flop, you can still rake in the cash if you spend next to no money on it. Paranormal Activity actually has a leg up, because they cast complete unknowns. Though I’m fairly certain Corey Feldman wouldn’t say no to PA7.

But here’s the thing. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is desperately clinging to a precipice. The sixth entry in a series that already forewent numbering their titles to avoid reminding people of the disastrous Paranormal Activity 4, it has been bullied and pushed around by nervous studios, surfacing a full two years after its intended release date. Other than the spin-off Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (which was actually pretty good, but had a miserable reception), this is the first film in series continuity since 2012, a deadly long stretch in the lifespan of a nascent franchise. And it’s in 3D, the last bastion of money-hemorrhaging franchises everywhere. So even though Blumhouse’s “final” announcement is a load of hogwash, there’s a lot riding on this one.

You’d think they’d have hired someone who actually knew how to tell a story.

In Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, it’s Christmas for some reason. Young couple Ryan (Chris J. Murray) and Emily (Brit Shaw) live in an absurdly massive Southern California house with their daughter Leila (Ivy George). Staying with them over the holidays are Ryan’s brother Mike (Dan Gill) and the sexy blonde Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley of Dude Bro Party Massacre III and therefore the biggest name in the film), who is on a “yoga retreat” and may or may not be Leila’s aunt, though the ferocity with which Mike tries to get in her pants would hopefully indicate that she’s just a friend of the family.

While setting up decorations, Ryan and Mike stumble upon a camera and a box of tapes. The former is built for spirit photography and detects strange presences around the house. The latter is composed variously of tapes from Paranormal Activity 3 and weird cult rituals with young Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) that 1) were put on tape for some unfathomable reason, and 2) confidently and efficiently contradict the events of Paranormal Activities 1 and 2, the only reliably good entries in the franchise. It soon becomes apparent that the same coven of witches that kidnapped the sisters has targeted Leila. Toby the demon is once again dispatched, though Leila’s connection to any previous Paranormal film is tenuous at best and blindly infuriating at worst. Also he may or may not be attempting to build a magical demon tunnel back to 1992.

Possibly because he wants to return to a time when Destiny’s Child was still on the radio.

Now, there’s something you need to now and probably suspect about Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. It is profoundly, hyperbolically stupid on a level that approaches the mythical. To approach the film on any level whatsoever, you must accept the fact that you will encounter nuggets like a grown man who needs the Bloody Mary game explained to him, or the suggestion that an eight-year-old might never have heard of the Bible even though her mother has one in the house and is religious enough to own a rosary and they’re celebrating Christmas what the hell. I’m surprised these people even know how to tie their shoes without help. But the first step to entertainment is admitting that the film has problems.

Seeing as the franchise from Part 3 on has been constructed almost exclusively from narrative and structural flaws. The Ghost Dimension’s anemic storytelling is hardly a shock to the system. Six films in, they’ve utterly given up even attempting to justify why an otherwise normal seeming family man would suddenly record his every move (even when hanging out and watching tapes with his brother), or why the hell he doesn’t look over the tapes once they’ve witnessed the overnight activity, even though he set them up for that express purpose. The found footage tropes have long been wearing thin, but here in 2015 the subgenre is hanging by the thinnest of threads, a Sword of Damocles over the heads of low budget producers.

However, there is one and exactly one unique idea that pumps a little helium into the film’s deflated stature: the spirit photography camera provides an interesting (though hardly explicitly mentioned) justification for continuing to record once the Toby hits the fan. The parents need to be able to see the demonic presence in order to run away from it properly. It’s simple but effective, and the camera also introduces the movie’s only unique visual premise. Of the half dozen high-def cameras the family can somehow afford to scatter around the house despite not having any discernible form of income, only one can actually see Toby himself. Of course, he manifests as a crappy screensaver-esque CG effect, but cutting between the true activity and the invisible antics that the other cameras record provides a feeling somewhere within the realm of tension.

It’s like the generic Safeway Select brand of fear.

As a jack-in-the-box horror picture, The Ghost Dimension is decent enough. There’s a long pause, the spooky thing goes boo, and you go home for a good night’s sleep. It won’t haunt you for a nanosecond following the closing credits (especially if your theater decides to jam an obnoxious Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse ad right in there like mine did), but it keeps the adrenaline pumping at an acceptable rate. There are at least two scenes that are striking, the first being the actually pretty beautiful tunnel shot spoiled by the poster, the second being an incredible gag involving a sheet that proves that implied monstrosities remain far superior to substandard CGI. Another good gag involving the old cult tapes is totally ignored by the film, so I shall follow suit here.

Yeah, that’s only two and a half moments, but in a Part 6 you take what you can get. The film’s other major accomplishment is the character of Mike, who Dan Gill plays as a sort of Joe Blow answer to Michael Cera. He’s a bald-faced comic relief character, but his naturalistic charms really gel with the movie’s atmosphere, though one line in particular slides a little too far toward Schwarzeneggerian quippery.

So, there’s that. The Ghost Dimension is a totally tolerable horror picture thanks to those unique elements, but the entire remainder of the film is made up of pure, jumbled, cinematic fecal matter. Allow me to run trough some choice grips in a feature I shall dub The Ghost Dissention:

• First off, that title is putrescent garbage. There are neither ghosts nor a dimension in the film, unless you count shoddy 3D effects, of which there are 4, all of which require Toby to lunge at a camera tripod for no particular reason.
• The film abrupt slams full tilt into exorcism territory, a useless attempt to incorporate silly religious iconography that the series had largely avoided up to this point.
• Every time the camera cuts. Ryan magically acquires more knowledge about Katie, with covens, and demons, attributed to “research.” No matter how hard he Googles, even he can’t connect Part 4 to the rest of the series.
• Series mainstay Katie Featherston makes not a single appearance, except to imply that somehow included among her demonic activities is the acquisition of a real estate license. Actually, that might be the evilest thing she’s ever done.
• They never do know how to end these films save for batting a camera about like a ping pong ball, but I dare you to find a worse acted BS anticlimax than this film.
• If you’re trying collect a child for a ritual in 1992, why go to the trouble of building a magic tunnel to Christmas 2013? Just grab someone off the street!
• [SPOILERS How the hell did Katie and Kristi grow up within a cult but somehow forget it all in time for the first two films? And how the hell could Toby gain corporeal form in 1992 if he still haunts them as an invisible presence in 2010? I feel like the screenwriters haven’t even heard of their own franchise, and that is intensely frustrating.]

Sometimes being a horror fan is like trying to find hay in a needle stack.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is a blithering excuse for a motion picture that ignores most of what made the franchise unique in the first place. But it hits its mark and performs its duty without being as offensively unscary as PA4, so at least that’s something. It’s a film that’s impossible to recommend on any level, but as a late franchise piece, it’s an acceptable – if bland – treat. Like a Fig Newton.

It must be said that I dearly hope that this film makes enough moolah not to be the true final chapter, because fans of the franchise (they exist, for some reason) deserve much more than this contradictory dreck.

TL;DR: Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is an utterly stupid, but basically enjoyable routine horror picture.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1628
Reviews In This Series
Paranormal Activity 4 (Joost & Schulman, 2012)
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Landon, 2014)
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Plotkin, 2015)

CinemaBeach: Paranormal Actividad

Year: 2014

Director: Christopher Landon

Cast: Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, Gabrielle Walsh

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

My first review of a 2014 movie! It's finally happening!

Also, is it just me or is the director kinda cute?

ANYway...

By the standards of the Paranormal Activity franchise, the spinoff Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones should get a full score just by including everything that’s in the trailer in the movie. It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult, but you’d be surprised. In fact, some of the most exciting and terrifying moments of the entire five-film series have taken place in two minute bursts before other movies.

To fully understand the ludicrously convoluted mythology of this spinoff, let’s do a quick summary of the franchise up to this point: [SPOILERS FOR PARTS 1-4 IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS] The original Paranormal Activity was a simple and taut found footage thriller about a young couple taping themselves at night to capture evidence of mysterious nightly visitations. It ended with a possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) murdering her boyfriend. PA2 takes place slightly before the events of this film and details the haunting of her sister Kristi (Sprague Grayden). Her husband and stepdaughter eventually stop the demon from possessing Kristi and kidnapping their infant son by transferring its malice to Katie. Cut to months later as possessed Katie kills both parents and steals the kid (Hunter). Fairly simple so far.

Let’s see how long that lasts. PA3 takes place in the 80′s, following the girls as children. Their mother and stepfather are murdered by the demon and they are taken by their grandmother, who is part of a coven of witches that have gained wealth and power in exchange for the souls of their firstborn male descendants. This flies in the face of everything we’ve known up until now (ie. Katie and Kristi not being raised by witches). PA4 follows a totally different family in Nevada with a teen daughter and a young son. Katie moves in next door and they end up babysitting the young boy she has brought with her – hoping their kids can be friends. Yadda yadda, kid is marked with demon symbols, haunting happens. The big takeaway here is that the son of the family is, in fact, the grown up Hunter and the demon wants him back. How did Katie lose him? How did he get to Nevada? Where did she get the kid she’s using now? I don’t know and neither do the writers. In their attempts to expand the mythology and explain the demon’s backstory, narrative continuity had to be thrown right out the window. Basically the only consistency at this point is the found footage element and the sped-up night shots.

So you can imagine the excitement I felt anticipating the immensely nonsensical and dubious twists and turns The Marked Ones would bring to the table. As a Latino spinoff to the franchise, it already had a leg-up to be promisingly inane. Let’s be clear – I have no problem with diversifying the franchise. The Latino demographic is a huge supporter of the series and horror characters tend to be overwhelmingly and exhaustingly Caucasian. But did it have to be its own separate spinoff? Why separate the storylines? It wouldn’t be difficult just to make Paranormal Activity 5 about Latino characters, it makes just as much sense as moving the fourth film to Nevada. It would save a lot of narrative strong-arming and avoid the whole “separating the races” thing it’s got going on. You have to be careful around that.

Quite surprisingly, the film rarely rises to the same level of idiocy as its concept, making it easily better than the third and fourth films right off the bat. Following the exploits of Oxnard teenager Jessie (Andrew Jacobs) and his friends Hector (Jorge Diaz) and Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh), The Marked Ones tells a familiar story – mysterious noises from a neighbor’s apartment, fun with a handheld camera, and a mysterious entity.

When Anna (Gloria Sandoval), the old lady who lives underneath Jessie’s apartment, is murdered mysteriously, the kids decide to explore her abandoned home but Jessie wakes up with a mysterious circular mark on his arm and he begins to change. At first he welcomes the presence – he can do cool stuff like blow up an air mattress in 5 seconds or do some rad kick flips on his skateboard. But once the presence reveals its intent to take over his body, his friends must rush to learn the secret of the Marked Ones and save his soul.

The scares are frequently anticlimactic – the anticipation gets you but the payoff is poor. However, there is a fair amount of solid found footage horror and a couple of truly great moments that manage to elevate the whole thing. It’s a totally average paranormal exploration film, but on the adjusted grading scale for handheld camera films, merely being average puts it far above most of its competition.

Also, on the filmmaking side, there’s some great use of editing for comedic effect. In general, the comic relief elements are consistently amusing, mostly coming from Hector, whose relatively poor grasp of Spanish allows him to act as a stand-in for the English-speaking audience members during some of the more Hispanic-centric scenes. He’s basically a paranormal Dora the Explorer.

The film is rife with connections to the original franchise both logical (the Marked Ones are pursued by the same coven run by Katie and Kristi’s grandmother; Kristi’s stepdaughter Ali (Molly Ephraim) returns to dump some exposition) and utterly preposterous (What are the child versions of the sisters doing in the basement?). Which again raises the question of the necessity of being a spinoff, because aside from not including sped-through night shots, the formula is more or less exactly the same. There’s even a gonzo final scene that throws about 800 wrenches into the idea of continuity, a franchise tradition.

And, come to think of it, that one subtraction actually removes an important element from the script. Without the necessity of filming themselves while they sleep, there’s no reason for Jessie and later Hector to keep filming at any point. In the later moments when stuff is really going down, literally the only reason Hector brings the camera along is because he’s in a Paranormal Activity film.

My verdict? The Marked Ones is inconsequential but it’s fun and trashy horror. It’s dumb, but not any more than the two films that preceded it (the Foolish Character award going to a girl who agrees to film a sex tape with a stranger she just met in a murdered lady’s apartment), both of which it is markedly superior to. It’s always engaging, occasionally scary, and a reassuring new look at an increasingly stale franchise that makes me excited for future installments.

Witches are hot right now, what with American Horror Story: Coven blowing up televisions everywhere, and The Marked Ones hits the sweet spot between an endlessly retold and familiar story and the fresh novelty of these new characters. Throw in a gangster family member with a shotgun (that is absolutely not as stereotypical as it sounds) and you’ve got yourself an exciting, if not particularly groundbreaking horror movie.

TL;DR: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is delightfully daffy and reasonably better than the two films that preceded it.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? It's reasonably scary and fun, so definitely - if you're in the mood for some January horror.
Word Count: 1263
Reviews In This Series
Paranormal Activity 4 (Joost/Schulman, 2012)
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Landon, 2014)
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Plotkin, 2015)

Final Round KO

21. Best Family in Horror: The Myers Family

Well, let's see. There's Laurie Strode and her brother Michael Myers (whoops, spoilers), her daughter Jamie Lloyd - who survives two whole movies as an 8-year-old - and her son from an alternate universe who is Josh Hartnett and thus a modern Hercules.

22. Worst Recent Horror Movie You've Seen: Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

The very first movie I reviewed, way back when when I was on Tumblr and I called myself Blogreel. Those times have since been lost to the wind. Unfortunately, this movie has not. It will forever go down in history as the horror movie that got so obsessed with itself that it forgot to be scary.

23. Favorite 1970's Horror: Suspiria (1977)

A violent Italian surrealistic Technicolor horror fantasy epic (the more words it takes to describe a movie, the better it is), Dario Argento's masterpiece of horror cinema is one of the most truly bizarre and off-putting films ever to grace the silver screen.

24. Favorite Horror Theme Song: Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

Honestly one of the flat out weirdest slasher movies to come out of the late period. I talk about it in more detail at CinemaBeach, but let's just say the guitar wielding killer sings an ode to his drill called "Let's Buzz" and leave it at that.

25. Best Version of Jason Voorhees: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

This film features Kane Hodder in his first appearance as the hockey-masked curmudgeon, and just look at that attention to detail. It's no big surprise that director John Carl Buechler was also a make-up artist. With his inexplicably massive frame and impeccable physical acting, Hodder is the ruler of the kingdom of Crystal Lake.

26. A Horror You Can't Wait To See: The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982)

I've been obsessed with this film ever since Randy mentioned it in Scream 2. Don't ask me why, because I couldn't tell you. I think I'm drawn to the title. But anyway, it has been nearly impossible to find in a non-janky edition but I got it! It's coming in the mail! I am so Excitebike right now.

27. Best Beheading: Friday the 13th (1980)

Oh, Pamela Voorhees and her man hands (played by Tom Savini). A blissfully crass ending to a wonderfully bad horror movie that ignited a generation (and the flames of my burning heart).

28. Favorite B-Movie Horror: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

You could film David Arquette eating a potato and I would give it a five star review. But throw him in the mix with giant spiders, and I'm so down I've come through on the other side of the globe.

29. Most Righteous Killer (For Good): Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)

He murders the hell out of Trey Songz and for that, I thank him. Also, he does pretty great at protecting his cousin.

30. Horror With An Ending You Didn't Expect to Happen: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Spoilers: [                   PENIS                         ]

Word Count: 502
Reviews in This Series
Horror Lover Challenge Part 1 (August 16, 2013)
Horror Lover Challenge Part 2 (August 25, 2013)
Horror Lover Challenge Part 3 (August 28, 2013)