Weekly Review -- The fourth time around

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) -- There is something to be said for a horror film when the poster turns out to be more frightening that the work itself. The fourth installment of the enormously popular franchise does not deliver on any level, except in terms of basic chills and thrills. It does not offer anything that we have not seen before and does not come close to the creepy, ominous original.

This time, we find ourselves in Henderson, Nevada, where a family is taking care of a neighbor's boy while his mother is in the hospital. Teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) and her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) notice strange things taking place, eerily parallel to the boy's stay in the house. Objects disappear, invisible shapes move around at night and Alex's little brother gets hurt. As they start investigating, they discover that they might be in over their heads...

The film is full of empty scares and inconsistencies. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's directing is good, as was the case with the previous sequel, but the screenplay feels sloppy and hurried. The only remotely thrilling sequences are the ones involving the Xbox Kinect, and those still drag on at times. The coven idea did not work for me in the last installment and is even less effective in this one. Are those witches/demons/whatnot supposed to have attacked a certain character? Killed them? Munched on them perhaps? Since when do we have a million of them? Nothing is explained. And what was with the whole child-in-a-buggy concept? There is only one single film that comes to mind when we see a child in a buggy encountering a supernatural presence. Please do not steal from The Shining. Not ever. It will always be light years ahead of this entire franchise. Also, it is funny how no one ever drops the camera -- lives might be at stake, but hey, what is danger if we do not film it for posterity? What about Katie? Was no one searching for her at all? Logic is definitely not the film's strong suit. 

Paranormal Activity 4 is one installment too many. It attempts to cash in on the success of the series -- based on the figures, it is succeeding -- but offers absolutely nothing new in terms of genre innovation. I do hope that the fifth one reverts to the original because, if it does not, the franchise is more doomed than its characters.

4/10