The script by Zack Estrin gives the best material to the teenagers played by Kathryn Newton and Matt Shively, and they’re very personable young performers. The series is finally moving forward chronologically, with this being the first film since the original to take place entirely after the events of the original, and yet the amount of new information that is offered up this time is truly frustrating. These films make it look low-fi in terms of staging and how scenes are built, but they are hard films to pull off, and so I thought Joost and Schulman might expand on the things they did in the third film, while the truth is that I think “PA4” is a step backwards, or at least a step sideways. Here’s the thing… “Paranormal Activity 4” is well-made. When I saw that Joost and Schulman were coming back to direct the fourth film, I thought the movie was in great hands, and I was excited to see what they came up with. I think the last fifteen minutes or so of “Paranormal Activity 3” is the scariest sustained sequence in any of the movies, and I thought it set up a really interesting broader canvass for the films. The film ended with an upsetting cliffhanger of sorts with Katie making off with young Hunter (William Juan Pietro), and part three went back in time to the ’80s to show Katie and her sister Kristi as kids, bringing in co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman to work with with Christopher Landon, who returned as the sole writer this time. It carefully built the big set pieces so it leaned on the exact same sort of scares that the first film did, but with a baby right there in the middle of things. It expanded the world a bit and started to try to make sense of what happened to Katie (Katie Featherston) and Michah (Micah Sloat) in the first film. Perry and Christopher Landon and Tom Pabst all contributed to the script. Tod Williams directed the sequel, and Michael R. Oren Peli, who wrote and directed the original, stepped into a more supervisory position, and as he started branching out with projects like “The River” and the still-unreleased “Area 51,” he helped other people build out the mythology that he started. It caught fire and it quickly became evident that the studio was going to want a follow-up. 2007’s “Paranormal Activity” did not pick up a distributor right away, and it didn’t hit theaters until September 2009, with Paramount treating it almost as an experiment. I think the “Paranormal Activity” series is fun.
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