I’m pretty sure that by now I could write a Paranormal Activity film:
Act I
“We have gophers/squirrels/spiders/termites/space invaders; I’m going to set up surveillance cameras everywhere.”
“Sure. Why not? What’s a gross invasion of privacy among family?”
–next day—
“The shade moved three inches by itself!”
“Um yeah. Say, did you catch that part where the au pair sleptwalked naked for 15 minutes?”
“Who wants to see that? Now come look at this rug indentation.”
Act II
“Check this out … the demon made toast!”
“You … you set up surveillance cameras for this?”
“Look! You can see the bread being loaded by itself!”
“You taped over our wedding album.”
“Now, get this! Here’s the thing – he actually puts cream cheese on the toast. Not butter, cream cheese!”
“Little Timmy’s first steps were on that DVD.”
Act III
“The dog is dead, the furniture is in the garage and Timmy now speaks Klingon.”
“Hmmmmm. I think something is going on.”
Everybody dies.
The end.
Paranormal Activity 4 boldly asks us to picture the life of a runaway possessed demoness and her spawn. Now you might ask, “what does a demon toddler eat?” I know because I asked this exact question. I pictured a pre-k group of parents at the playground:
“Oh, Linus won’t touch his vegetables these days! I don’t know how to get him to eat anything healthy.”
“Get this – Lucy eats nothing but Cheerios and Goldfish crackers.”
“Yeah. Damien will only consume the still-beating heart of a baby fawn.”
“Whaaaaa?”
“It’s OK. Nabisco makes it.”
Katie (Katie Featherston), our –for lack of a better word – protagonist from Paranormal 1 has fled to Nevada where her creepy child shows up to hinder the neighbors, our focus this time around. Thanks to the pervy boyfriend of teen Alex, cameras get set up all over the house to spy on the standard nocturnal G-rated doings. The events accelerate when the family is forced to harbor the stoic [read: creepy] boy from across the street. And by “accelerate” I mean we go 
from “nothing of interest happening” to “nothing of interest happening at 3 a.m.” I developed several problems with this version early on: First one was I recognized Alex (Kathryn Newton) as the snotty teen love interest in Bad Teacher. Now that just violates all rules of the franchise. If I recognize the actress outside the Parabubble *poof* there goes your illusion. Second was that although 3 a.m. was prime time for this family, nobody ever woke up and went straight to the bathroom. That’s just silly. If you wake up frightened, sure, go check out the noise. But everybody else is waking to the call of nature, ghost be damned. Third is this franchise introduced video games and the demon child wasn’t interested. Are you kidding me? Like you got something better going on? What.the.HELL? Your whole life is showing up and looking at stuff … but Super Mario Kart doesn’t make the cut for flipping your little demonic red light? You know, what is the big plan here? Why do tolerate people you want dead? What does your patience matter?
Paranormal Activity is an awful franchise. It exists just for the cheap thrill – I counted three false ones (friend pretending to be a monster, that sort of thing) before anything even mildly creepy happened. And it felt cheap, too, like a deliberate nude upper torso shot from the back to maintain a PG-13 rating. The sooner we ignore this form of entertainment, the better we are as a society.
The demon is back to make us all frown
You just can’t keep good evil down
This depressing cycle leaves nobody alive.
I simply can’t wait for number five!
Rated R, 88 Minutes
D: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
W: Christopher Landon, Chad Feehan
Genre: “Reality” “entertainment”
Type of DEMON most likely to enjoy this film: The crying-on-the-outside kind.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: The human kind
