User blog:Porterfield/Paranormal Activity 4 Review Roundup

The fourth installment of the Paranormal Activity series comes out today, and this greatly affects two types of people: die-hard P.A. loyalists and scary movie buffs who will buy a ticket to any fright show during the month of October. It also appears that the Latino population in the U.S. is expected to turn out in big numbers, as they saw the first three Paranormal Activity films in disproportional numbers compared to the national population. Just an interesting factoid for ya!

Without further ado, here is a compilation of reviews for the new film. Many top critics have given it a score of 2 out of 4 stars, so it's hard to imagine the new movie being anything more or less than average, which is too bad.

Alison Willmore - Movieline
Score: 7 out of 10

Excerpt: I have to admit, they've managed to grow on me. The ingenuity required to work within the restraints of this dictated form of spookiness while coming up with new scares makes for some clever uses of space, timing and the way things are arranged in the frame.

James Rocchi - Boxoffice Magazine
Score: 3 out of 5 stars

Excerpt: Again, it's hard to not like this series. I'll always take a horror film franchise motivated by imagination and trepidation over one washed lazily downstream by a torrent of fake blood, and while Alex and her family are set up like lambs for the slaughter, that still doesn't mean we don't gulp when the time comes for the finale.

Mark Olsen - LA Times
Score: 3 out of 5 stars

Excerpt: "Paranormal Activity 4" is in many ways one big setup, building to a single, inevitable what's-behind-you jump scare and then a rollicking finale — one that implies a deeper mythology, opening the door (but of course) for another sequel.

Peter Howell - Toronto Star
Score: 2 out of 4 stars

Excerpt: Been there, shrieked that, but there are a couple of laughs. The dad actually switches a light on during one haunting spell, and who ever does that in a horror movie? And Wyatt amusingly recalls The Shining as he tools around the house on his jumbo trike. Things start to get downright silly when PA4 shudders to an abrupt halt and then links back to events of PA3.

Sara Stewart - New York Post
Score: 2 out of 4 stars

Excerpt: The “PA” formula is tried and true. Long stretches of placid green night-cam footage manage to make your flesh creep as you try to figure out if you just saw movement in the corner. Then something eventually flies dramatically across the screen, and no matter how much you tried to gird yourself, you jump. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Rafer Guzman - Newsday
Score: 2 out of 4 stars

Excerpt: To its credit, "Paranormal Activity 4" almost never ogles young Alex, played by the appealing newcomer Kathryn Newton, but she and her almost-boyfriend Ben (a likeable Matt Shively), bring a youthful energy to this ossifying series. They're an endearing pair, flirting and sharing confidences via Skype.

===Claudia Puig - USA Today=== Score: 2 out of 4 stars

Excerpt: The Paranormal movies hinge on the increasingly popular concept of found footage, in which large swaths of the story are presented as a homemade video capturing unseen ghostly events. While the first Paranormal Activity in 2007 was fresh and genuinely frightening, the concept has grown stale and gimmicky. In this sloppy installment, some visuals don't even fall within found-footage parameters or adhere to the story's internal logic.

Stephen Witty - Newark Star-Ledger
Score: 2 out of 4 stars

Excerpt: There's a truly experimental edge to that kind of filmmaking and one that might be worthy of real study. Or certainly of more exploration by a better filmmaker, with a more ambitious aim of examining different ways of seeing. But instead, it's been taken over by a bunch of pranksters with no larger goal than jumping out regularly and shouting -- Boo!

Joe Neumaier - New York Daily News
Score: 1 out of 5 stars

Excerpt: What hard-working directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (who also did “PA 3,” as well as the tricksy faux-documentary “Catfish”) can’t capture is the correct ratio of scares-to-tedium. These movies, with their meta-You Tube frights, live or die on those. There are a few jolts, yet most are from someone jumping into the frame (which quickly grow tiresome).

Brian Henry Martin - UTV
Score: 1 out of 10

Excerpt: The actors or non-actors as they should be, are so naturalistic that they deliver their non performances with a kind of dead pan whine. Why we would want to watch a badly filmed movie on a big screen is beyond me. It is a waste of a wonderful film projector. Found footage would be better viewed on your phone, or simply left in the bin.