Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
Years ago, when I reviewed Paranormal Activity 2, I commented that I was one day going to have to watch the third installment because it had been added to the They Shoot Zombies list. I don’t like this series at all, so I was dreading this and putting it off. But, eventually, you have to take the plunge, and so here we are with Paranormal Activity 3.
The first movie in the series was a fantastic example of a very smart filmmaker filming very stupid characters. The second movie at least gave us characters whose motivations could be understood. They did the wrong thing over and over, of course, but at least it was understandable. It was also a prequel to the first movie. This, the third installment in the series, is a pre-prequel, dipping further back into the history of the characters from the first movie, going all the way back to the 1980s.
What this means is that we’re going to be dealing with Katie and Kristi, this time as young children. We start in 2005, with an adult Katie (Katie Featherston) delivering a box of VHS tapes to Kristi (Sprague Grayden). A year later, the house is ransacked and the tapes are stolen. The rest of the film is footage from the tapes, which features the girls as children. In keeping with the continuity, Kristi is pregnant (her son is the focus of the second movie), and the theft that occurs at the start of this movie is essentially the inciting incident from the second film.
So, the film actually takes place in 1988, with Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) at roughly the age of six. They are living with their mother Julie (Lauren Bittner) and her boyfriend Dennis (Chris Smith). Dennis is a video nerd in the relatively early days of video. One night, while attempting to make a sex tape, Dennis and Julie are interrupted by an earthquake. In looking at the footage later, Dennis sees what looks like a figure visible only from falling dust. Based on the advice of his friend Randy (Dustin Ingram), who he shows the sex tape to, Dennis hooks up cameras around the house, which is why we have a movie.
What we’re going to get is that Kristi has an “imaginary” friend named Tobi, who is naturally the source of the hauntings that are happening in the house. Ultimately, we’re going to discover that Tobi is real and that Tobi has a connection to the girls. None of this is a shock—we already know through the first two movies that Katie and Kristi have a connection to the supernatural that was brought about through a curse on the family. This is the story of how that curse came to be.
This brings up what is the biggest problem with Paranormal Activity 3: we know where this is going. I’m going to offer spoilers here from the first two movies, so if you haven’t seen them, you should probably stop reading now. However, if you haven’t seen the first two movies, there’s no good reason to be reading about the third one, so that’s on you.
Anyway, there’s surprisingly good story continuity from the films. In the first film, we see Katie becoming possessed and killing her boyfriend. The second film shows us the story of Kristi and her husband dealing with a similar possession, her husband transferring the possession from Kristi to Katie, which leads to the first film and ends with not just the death of Katie’s boyfriend, but also to Katie murdering Kristi and her husband and running off with their infant son. What Paranormal Activity 3 tells us is how Kristi got possessed originally, thanks to the actions of another family member—I won’t actually spoil that.
What this means for the viewer, though, is that the conclusion is guaranteed, and the film is entirely about how we get to that conclusion. Because of this, it’s ultimately not very interesting.
The benefit of found footage films for the directors is that they are dirt cheap to make, and Paranormal Activity 3 is no different in that respect. What it means for the viewer is that there is frequently a lot of chaff as we wait for anything meaningful to happen to the characters on screen. To be fair, there’s actually less of that in Paranormal Activity 3; this gets to the meat of the story a lot faster, and I appreciate that.
As much as I hate to say it, this actually comes close to being a decent movie. There’s a lot less boring stuff happening here, and that helps. The characters are frequently very dumb, though, which is something it has in common with the first film (seriously—knowing there’s something going on, they play Bloody Mary?). Ultimately, though, because there’s no surprise in terms of where this is going, it’s hard to think that highly of it.
Why to watch Paranormal Activity 3: The overall story is surprisingly consistent.
Why not to watch: The ending is a foregone conclusion.