I was looking forward to this movie. I had a hard day at work and I loved Paranormal Activity 2. I often use the Paranormal Activity movies as an example of truely scary movies and brilliant work with minimal budgets and practical effects. It's brilliant in its simplicity.
So, what did I think? I thought it could've been better. I'll get to that in a moment but I feel the need to explain something. Boo scares shouldn't be used so much. Here's why. When you are laying out a truely scary scene, the tension needs to build to a boiling point. That can be done with really minimal effort. To establish that there is something unseen in the house, you could swing a hanging light, you can do some subtle scary sounds, you can slowly move something. Anything that can possibly be written off as something mundane. Boo scares are like shooting a shotgun. Bang and it's done. You blew your load. That's your big payoff in one big strike. Sometimes you want that because it does give the audience a good jolt of energy. But when it's done so often, the audience become desensitized to it. They start to expect it more. Plus, all the tension leading up to that boo scare goes away and you have to start building again for the next scare.
Was the movie scary? Yes. Very much so. But I do feel like this latest movie was of a sorts a betrayal of what made the first one so compelling. There was much more emphasis on kinetic energy, boo scares, and a couple ill concieved CG effects. Paranormal activity 3 suffers because of the success of the other two movies. With success comes a lot more money. With more money comes the temptation to take the movie away from it's independant movie roots and add things that might seem cool in theory and you couldn't do previously because of budget restrictions.
Another reason I didn't like it as much as I thought I would was because this one opens up some serious plot holes. Some that really cripple the atmospheric feel of the trilogy in general. They were gaping holes in the story and they sucked me right out of it. Here's what I mean and what I think I would've done differently.
1) Who's watching the tapes? In the beginning of the movie, we establish that Katie has these tapes of their childhood. A time that they forgot about. (More on that later) But a few moments later we are in Paranormal Activity 2 just after the house is burlarized. The only thing stolen were these homemade movies from about 20 years ago. Leading the audience to one of two conclusions: a) the burglars are watching these tapes and we never established that fact or b) the ghost/demon/spirit thing didn't want anyone to see these tapes and probably hid them somewhere or destroyed them. Either way, we have a problem. It's never established how or why we are watching these old VHS videos.
My solution: Instead of having the tapes stolen, think of it like we are the police. There's been a brutal murder and we are trying to solve it. We know that the house has cameras everywhere. (Paranormal Activity 2) We know this family has this weird obsession with taping everything. We see the tapes and we see the scene where Katie is talking about all the weird things that happened to them while they were kids. Ok. That gives the police officer an idea to go back and look at all the old tapes of the time she was talking about. That brings the audience into the movie as a character playing a role, thus making the sensations more realistic.
2) The children had their memories erased. So how can Katie remember what happened in Paranormal Activity 2?
My solution: make it something vague. Sometimes she has bad dreams about evil ghosts. Something like that would've helped.
3) Why didn't the mother know what was going on? This gets into spoiler territory but it is a nagging question and one I don't have an answer for. I won't go into detail because I don't wish to spoil the movie (I only do that for bad movies) but let's say something is established later on in the movie and logically speaking, the mother should've been at least somewhat knowledgeable about what was happening.
One of the major characteristics of this series is vagueness. We never see the spirit. We never really know what it wants. We never know why it lashes out. Even when lashing out is counter-productive to it's supposed goal. And we never learn any effective way to combat the spirit. But this isn't a story. It's an experience. The story comes from the trailer. "We have these tapes. I don't know what to make of it, but here it is. It's scary. Your guess is as good as mine."
If you love scary movies, it's hard to go wrong with this trilogy.
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