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.
When you combine two of your most favourite things in the world the result is not always what you thought it would be. For example, combining a delicious cheeseburger with an equally delicious piece of chocolate cake probably won’t end well. Chocolate cakeburger, anyone?
How about combining two of my most favourite television shows? Holmes Inspection, the Mike Holmes branded inspection and renovation show, and Ghost Hunters, the SyFy channel’s flagship paranormal investigation franchise. The result, well duh, is Paranormal Home Inspectors and I’m not sure it’s all that much better than a chocolate cake burger.
Paranormal Home Inspectors is new this fall on Discovery Channel Canada. It’s based, as far as I can tell, mainly in and around Toronto and feels very much like Holmes Inspection in terms of production value and quality. But, of course, this show involves ghosts.
Let me take you through a typical episode.
Admittedly, Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot is a pretty obscure television show. So obscure that it isn’t even listed on Epguides, and it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Everything has a Wikipedia page these days.
Nevertheless, it’s right up my alley and odds are someone might stumble upon these reviews and give it a look — or give it a pass — as a result. Either way, here we go.
The second episode of Finding Bigfoot finds us in Florida, home to the infamous Skunk Ape (which, incidentally, does have its own Wikipedia page).
Now the so-called Skunk Ape is something particularly interesting to Bigfooters. While Bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest remain reasonably consistent, so too do the sightings of the Skunk Ape in the Florida Everglades—but the two, together, don’t match. Instead, the Skunk Ape is thought to be something of a cousin to the vanilla Bigfoot. Shorter, redder, and accompanied by a pungent methane odor that gives it its name. Still, like Bigfoot, the Skunk Ape has passed from Native American legend into modern times and Finding Bigfoot is about to dig up all they can on the creature.
I like Bigfoot. In fact, I like a lot of weird things, like the paranormal, aliens, and cryptoids but Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, tops them all. Weird, I know. But you can imagine my interest when I heard about a new show on Animal Planet called Finding Bigfoot. I had to check it out.
Now if you’re into these sorts of shows then let me lay out the field for you. Finding Bigfoot falls somewhere in between a show like MonsterQuest and a show like Ghost Hunters. For those of you that don’t follow these kinds of shows let me put it to you this way. Finding Bigfoot falls in the spectrum between a show featuring tenured academics weighing in on strange creatures and unusual happenings, and a show featuring a bunch of guys running around hunting ghosts with night-vision cameras.
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.
OK, so I have a more than passing interest in the paranormal. So a new television show like Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files is going to, in the least, pique my interest for a few episodes. But can it hold it beyond that?
In my experience, paranormal TV runs the gamut from something very scientific and research-based like MonsterQuest (featuring actual tenured academics) to something more akin to a couple of guys running around in the dark without flashlights cursing and swearing to appear cool—like Extreme Paranormal. (For Extreme Paranormal, picture the Jackass franchise done with ghosts.) Somewhere in the middle, is a balanced show like Ghost Hunters, one of the original and most successful series in this genre. A show in which two plumbers and a rag-tag group of other investigators set out to use what they deem to be scientific tools to track and record ghosts. They’ve been doing it for a long time, seven years now, and they’re honest in their pursuit whether or not the “science” they use is altogether scientific.
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!
