Paranormal Activity 3 is the third installation in a film franchise that up to now I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve previously reviewed Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 on pretty positive notes. Like The Blair Witch Project, which scared the crap out of my friends and I in the 90′s, the Paranormal Activity series has been pretty pioneering in its creation of thrills and chills.
The third installation, however, makes it clear that the premise has worn itself absolutely thin.
It struck me, after unintentionally watching two very similar films, to do a themed review. I’m calling this Summer Films in Small Spaces; these are two excellent movies to watch this summer—popcorn thrillers—dealing with very small, cramped, and confined spaces.
Last year, Paranormal Activity took the box office by storm. Shot for a staggeringly low $15,000 the movie quickly became the highest grossing film of all time, in terms of return on investment. The popularity was due, in part, to a pretty successful viral marketing campaign using Twitter and Facebook.
Paranormal Activity 2 did it again, according to Wikipedia, breaking box office records for the highest grossing opening for an R-rated movie—beating out Watchmen. This, again, with relatively little to no traditional marketing or promotion.
If you didn’t see the first installment what you need to know about the franchise is this: the movies follow the lives of ordinary people who are being tormented by a ghost—an evil spirit—and is filmed in a reality-TV, first-person kind of perspective. In the first movie, it was shot largely by one of the lead characters who captured the poltergeist activity on an HD video camera, sometimes hand held, and during the night, on a tripod using nightshot. This perspective, in the first film, lent to the creepy, restrictive atmosphere of the whole thing and like The Blair Witch Project before it, served to really scare the heck out of viewers.
Over the weekend I had a man date with my friend Jason. Like all manly men do when they get together, we decided to watch a scary movie. We picked Paranormal Activity a movie we both wanted to see but hadn’t got around to yet because, in both our cases, we didn’t have anyone to watch it with—and this isn’t the kind of movie you want to watch alone!
I haven’t seen one of the new 3D movies. We didn’t go watch Avatar when it was in theatres, and personally I think the technology seems pretty hokey. But what about choose your own adventure?
The clip below, from a company called 13th Street is advertising a new kind of cinema, one in which the viewer can interact with the film and change the outcome. In this case, it’s done by phoning different viewers in the audience and changing the outcome of the film based on recognized voice commands. Is this the new step in immersive horror films or just another hokey Hollywood breakthrough?
What do you think? Leave a comment.
