31 Days of Halloween - Day 20: Paranormal Activity 4 review

They need to just stop making these movies. Tie up the story and end it. I genuinely enjoyed the first Paranormal Activity and thought they had improved on certain aspects of the story in the second one. The third one kinda confused me and felt like they were retconning the story a bit. Now this fourth one has just screwed the whole franchise up. 

By itself, PA4 wouldn't be so bad. Ok, the acting sucks and the scares, while good, are few and far between. However, the problem with this film is because it's a direct sequel yet it has more plot holes than it knows what to do with! It makes no sense how the film is a sequel from to PA2 except you see the appearance of Katie from the previous movies. Other than that, there's no real connection, at least not any that is reasonable. Why is this new family targeted by the demon now? The explanation is ridiculous and raises more questions than it answers. 

They have new technology to record the haunting in this film in the way of Macs and iChat and they do this cool effect with an Xbox. The problem is, they don't use these effects to their full advantage. As for recording the iChats 24/7, give me a break. Unless they have terabyte hard drives on all those Macs, it would be literally impossible to record the events in this film. Yet another plothole. Let's also not forget the need to record EVERY FUCKING THING with handheld cameras. Ok, you're being chased and your number one priority is to ensure the shot is perfectly framed? 

I'm so over these films. This one didn't do anything new. We've seen all this before. Can we get something else besides seeing mundane family shit or the sound of a pot dropping on the floor? "OMG, something just banged against the wall!" Yes, there were a couple of good scares that made me jump or scream "oh shit" but that's not enough for this to be an amazing movie. So to the filmmakers: give up the ghost. If you do make another PA film, finish off the story, take your millions and run. If we get another piece of tripe like this one, I'm going to be really pissed and just consider you the horror version of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.