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More of the same, though creepier than it was the last time
Fans of the first two Paranormal Activity films know full well that sisters Katie (Katie Featherstone) and Kristi (Sprague Grayden) had been tormented at some point in their childhood before enduring a resurgence of similar hauntings as adults. Paranormal Activity 3 proceeds to fill in those blanks, taking place in a pristinely captured 1988 as yet another man convinces yet another woman to record the supernatural shenanigans taking place in their home.
It’s handy that Katie and Kristi’s mom had a relationship with a wedding videographer (ill-defined here in the not-quite-finished cut that we were shown — father? stepfather? boyfriend?), because he’s that much more prone to documenting the young girls’ increasingly aggressive encounters with an invisible friend named Toby. From here, we as an audience fall into the usual sub-routines of watching the footage — first from one stationary camera, then two, then a third slyly (if improbably) placed on the base of an oscillating fan, with occasional handheld interludes — and waiting for the Pavlovian drone that accompanies our dear demon’s arrival.
The most remarkable quality of the Paranormal franchise above all other found-footage offerings is their repeated insistence on forcing the viewer to sit up and shut up, tasked with examining every frame for the next hint of domestic disruption rather than serving up scares on a silver platter. For some, a fine line separates scrutiny of the seemingly everyday from outright boredom, and for most, questions of logical human behavior remain amid the mayhem. This film won’t convert those already frustrated with the oft-stationary bump-in-the-night routine, but directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (of the questionably accurate documentary Catfish) acknowledge that fans know the formula by now and proceed to not mess with success.
If anything, they both pick up the pace and establish the period in small, critical ways; a possessed Lite-Brite is such a playful touch, it’s a pity that Teddy Ruxpin doesn’t follow its eerie, era-appropriate lead by coming to life. There isn’t a room in this California home that doesn’t have a set of lights dangling down from the ceiling for maximum sway while our family sleeps, while a game of “Bloody Mary” in the bathroom brings expectedly intense results. Between cheeky fake-out moments, genuine jolt cues, and more sinister suggestion, PA3 earns a greater share of goosebumps than its predecessor, culminating in an extended, ostensibly uncut sequence that echoes the franchise’s overall knack for impressively immediate scares and questionable judgment on behalf of the participants. (The adult actors are all suitably stubborn, and the young actresses are aptly screechy. I’d distinguish them by name, but a full list of credits eludes me in advance of the film’s October 21 release date.)
In terms of actually expanding the mythos, screenwriter Christopher Landon basically sticks with stall tactics, promising more of the same potential for “boo!” beats while not telling us much more about Katie and Kristi’s family that we didn’t already gather from the second film. This one leaves the door open to continue forth in the ’80s or return to the present day to see what became of the now-possessed Katie, who briefly arrives at the start to introduce the VHS tapes that we’ll be watching, although they would’ve likely been destroyed, whether by an aforementioned fire or later villainy. I struggle to think that we’ll be seeing a Paranormal Activity 4 assembled out of Super 8 and ultrasound footage, but sillier things have happened in the name of keeping cash cows alive.
Is PA3 every bit the prequel that it could’ve been? Hardly, but a year-long turnaround on follow-ups leaves little room for any grand feat of creativity. For better or worse, this is more of the same, if creepier than it was the last time around. Good luck finding a better haunted house on 2,000 screens this Halloween.
Grade: B-
Although Featherston and Grayden make token appearances in a portentous prologue, preteen newcomers assume their roles throughout the rest of "Paranormal Activity 3." Pic details how Dennis (Chris Smith), the girls' videographer dad, becomes obsessed with discovering the source of latenight noises that echo throughout their spacious suburban home -- and learning the true nature of an imaginary playmate who may not be so imaginary after all.
Again like its predecessors, the film pivots on the conceit that its elliptical narrative has been culled from videos shot by someone (or a couple of someones) who cannot be called upon to provide any sort of explanatory narration. (It's interesting to consider whether some future sequel will identify just who's been editing together all this spooky stuff.)
Given that Dennis usually makes a living as a wedding videographer, the new pic makes it seem a bit more plausible that the individual shooting the video (and in this case, his eager assistant) would be so adroit at setting up surveillance cameras, and so determined to keep filming long after most other folks would have fled to safer environs.
Co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman ("Catfish"), working from a script by "Paranormal Activity 2" co-writer Christopher B. Landon, pull off some ingeniously suspenseful scenes that are all the more effective for their constrained points of view. Because the camera is either stationary or handheld, the audience doesn't always see everything it anxiously wants to see, and can only imagine the worst is occurring just beyond the frame.
Some of the scariest moments are those captured by a camera Dennis supposedly has jerry-rigged atop the base of an oscillating fan. On more than one occasion, the viewer waits breathlessly while the camera pans away from something vaguely disturbing or unsettling -- and then gets seriously rattled as the camera pans back to confirm worst expectations.
Viewers who were turned off by the repeated bickering of the two leads in the first "Paranormal Activity" may have a similar response to scenes here in which Dennis tries to convince Julie (his wife and the girls' mother) that something supernatural may be afoot, and she simply refuses to listen. A few of the franchise's most devoted fans also may object to the new pic's attempt to explain why Katie and Kristi turned out the way they did by alluding to the influence of a witches' coven, a plot wrinkle that seems almost as literal-minded as those suggestions in later "Halloween" sequels that the masked Mike Meyers was supernaturally enhanced by modern-day Druids.
Despite that, however, "Paranormal Activity 3" earns points for its low-key ability to keep viewers primed over long stretches to expect that something very bad, or even worse, may happen at any moment. Pic premiered in near-complete form as a midnight secret screening at Austin's genre-skewing Fantastic Fest, where audience response indicated that favorable word-of-mouth buzz soon may reach deafening levels.
One of the traditions of Fantastic Fest is the secret screenings -- kept a mystery from all attendees until, ideally, the last moment between the theater being filled and the lights going down. Earlier this week, the crowd took in Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In" as the first secret screening of Fantastic Fest 2011; yesterday night -- or, for that matter, this morning -- the midnight crowd were told that they'd be seeing an unfinished cut of "Paranormal Activity 3," the latest installment of the low-budget/high-effect horror series begun in 2007 by Oren Pelli.
Unfinished, yes, but not unwelcome; whether you like the first "Paranormal" or consider it a warmed-over mix of "Poltergeist" and "The Blair Witch Project," it's worth noting that for all of their jumps and jolts , the "Paranormal" films traffic more in tension than in gore, more in half-seen shades of grey than mere crimson blood. Starting with glimpses of the first film's Katie (Katie Featherston) and her sister, the second film's Kristi (Sprague Grayden) as they hand some storage boxes between each other, we see a huge stack of VHS tapes. We then jump back to 1988, where Featherston's and Grayden's mother (Lauren Bittner) is a young mom with a loving boyfriend, Danny, who makes his money filming wedding videos and two darling young daughters, Katie and Kristi … and a beautiful home full of love and laughter and odd nightsounds that, as fans of the series know, will only grow louder as we skip through the tapes …
The conceit of the series -- that all of this is found footage, assembled after the fact, in an attempt to explain the death and terror and unexplainable events they capture -- is either slightly annoying or lightly maddening. For one example, the slow-hand marketing of the film means that I have no way of naming the actor who plays Danny, and must apologize to both him and you. That conceit also means that you spend no small amount of time thinking "Dude, put down the camera …" when, say, Danny is running through the house when he thinks -- quite rightly -- that his girlfriend's daughters are in peril.
Directed by "Catfish" filmmakers -- the debate if they're documentarians or con artists will be settled another day -- Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, "Paranormal Activity 3" nonetheless overcomes the problems with the franchise's central mechanic by both delivering serious scares and, more often than you might think, a few laughs. (Joost and Schulman mess with our heads with gags that revel in the awareness of how the previous "Paranormal" films worked without ever leaning on it too heavily.) There's also a few nice nods to "Poltergeist" -- TV's on to static in the middle of the night, creepy toys (including, in a very era-appropriate touch, Teddy Ruxpin) and young parents unwinding with a little reefer.
But the films most often in the mix here are the previous "Paranormal" movies, and screenwriter Christopher B. Landon fills in what we know about the haunted, hounded sisters we've seen as adults with glimpses of their childhood -- specifically, Kristi's imaginary friend Toby, who is neither imaginary nor friendly. The effects are applied with a delicate hand -- except when they aren't -- and as we go from superbly mixed distant creaks that may or may not be happening in the far reaches of the home to reality-defying catastrophes that crash in front of us to dizzying and startling effect, you can feel Joost and Schulman ratcheting up the tension in this brisk, brief 85-minute striptease of gooseflesh, where you never quite see everything and yet you're still acutely mesmerized.
"Paranormal Activity 3" is mostly only lightly undermined what it is -- a lather, rinse, repeat three-quel that continues the aesthetic and characters of films we've seen before. At the same time, better the scares and startles of the "Paranormal" series than the gore and gross-outs of, say, the "Saw" films or Rob Zombies bloody, boring "Halloween" retreads. I'd be quite happy if this were the last "Paranormal" film -- the only places to go are, I should imagine, back to a past of pioneer days or forward to a future of jumpsuits and food pills, and I can't quite imagine either working -- but also because it would be nice to have a horror franchise go out not with a whimper but a bang.
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