Tim here. Autumn is in full swing, Halloween is around the corner, and it's time for a visit from an old seasonal friend in the form of the Paranormal Activity franchise. 2015's entry, the sixth overall, is titled in full Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, and it's important for two reasons: it's the first one to be shown in 3D, and it's allegedly going to be the last one. Oh sweet Lord, please let it be the last one.
The 2007 Paranormal Activity was an exercise in brutal simplicity: sometimes, terrifying things would happen in a couple's bedroom while they were sleeping, and they had a camera set up to record all of those terrifying things for our benefit. It's as blunt and unfussy as three-chord rock. And all of the film's sequels have taken it as their primary goal to screw that up as hard as possible, adding layer upon layer of nonsense mythology, time travel, and a community of witches cultivating one family across generations to be the handmaidens to a malevolent spirit called Toby.
The Ghost Dimension takes as its stated goal the summation of all this mythology into one definitive chapter where all is explained. It fails, of course. Summing up the messy dog-ends of the Paranormal Activity pictures would have been beyond the scope of one movie, and given the increasingly arbitrary twists in the franchise, it would hardly have been satisfying. What The Ghost Dimension does manage to do is execute the reveal that all six movies have been building up to a tediously straightforward "find a body for the Devil" scenario, something that plenty of other movies have been able to sketch out in a first act, and not several hours over the course of more than a half of a decade. It's a damp squib of a finale if ever there was one.
Scaling back to this individual film, The Ghost Dimension finds yet another California family in an unreasonably big suburban house (this one decorated for Christmas), dealing with inexplicable goings-on. Ryan (Chris J. Murray) and Emily (Brit Shaw) are the parents of Leila (Ivy George), an adorable moppet of the most nauseatingly precious stripe; Ryan's brother Mike (Dan Gill) is staying with them while recovering from a nasty break-up, and family friend Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley) is staying with them for reasons in some manner pertaining to yoga. Like a yogacation, I think? The movie is profoundly indifferent on explaining why Skyler is there, yoga never becomes a plot point, and she doesn't even emerge as a realistic potential sexual partner for Mike, which is what their first couple of scenes together plainly wanted us to take away.
Mike and Ryan find an ancient '80s camcorder in the attic, and start goofing around recording everything, while also watching tapes of the camcorder's previous owners, detailing in cryptic terms the witch cult that previous films have cautiously failed to flesh out. And this uncorks an Ancient Evil that start speaking to Leila, as will happen in movies of demonic possession and children, but with a twist! The twist being that the ancient camcorder can see ghosts, or at least ghostly particles, which have an unnerving tendency to look like those big flocks of gnats you sometimes walk into by accident at twilight in the summertime. Later, as the ghosts become more powerful, they look like somebody put a bunch of kelp in a wind tunnel.
Visualizing the ghosts was a definitively terrible idea. The series' strength has always (only) been the eeriness of the unseen, watching children idly conversing with things that aren’t there, seeing the effects of movement but not the movement itself. There might not have been any way to come up with a visible ghost that wouldn't have sucked out the last little pleasure the PA films have on offer as horror. Even if there was, it wasn't these ghosts, which look weird rather than creepy and which aren't helped at all by the awful, awful 3D effects, which make no sense within the film's narrative ('80s camcorders not being kitted out with 3D rigs, as a rule), and have the otherworldy, tacked-on shininess of an effect that was plainly not on set with the actors.
Needless to say, none of this is more than incidentally scary. Some of first-time director Gregory Plotkin's jump scares are sufficiently shocking for a quick little frisson, but there's no making things creepy in any sustained ws, not with those boringly visible ghosts. Gill's performance as the prototypical grown-up adolescent is charmingly scuzzy enough that he feels like a person (Gill has a meaningful career backing up this performance, a rarity for Paranormal Activity castmembers), but in even that cartoon version of humanity, he is alone. The film devolves into an exercise in watching CG blobs float around boring figures making stupid choices – "devolves", I say, but the film starts there and never deviates.
Thus ends a once cast-iron franchise, on dull reveals, limp scares, and mediocre box office. Rest well, Paranormal Activity; the last thing anybody wants is for this particular corpse to come back to life.
Rating: D