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Oct 18, 201270The film is heavily reliant on jump scares, but its best moments are the ones before them, when the tension builds without the benefit of escalating music to queue you in to the approaching shock.
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67The mythology has deepened, largely to the negative, and the formula is as rigid as the fixins of a fast-food sandwich-tastes the same in every city. But the effects are eternally reliable.
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Oct 20, 201260Paranormal Activity 4 will please the fans, and that should sustain this low-budget, highly profitable franchise.
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Oct 18, 201260This film's strong suit is that it finally feels contemporary.
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60Catfish pair Joost and Ariel Schulman keep the franchise firmly on track with a satisfyingly scary fourth instalment.
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Oct 17, 201260Paranormal Activity 4 may mean more of the same, but in a modern horror landscape too often made up of equal parts of gore and boredom and resigned straight-to-video, it's a chiller designed to be seen in a crowded theater, and that alone makes it superior to its peers.
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60Aside from the usual self-slamming doors and flying bodies, there are enough creepy kids and hiding knives to distract from a plot that's increasingly mobile yet running on the spot.
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50The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.
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50This is hardly reinventing the wheel, but it is serviceable, if you're looking for a few shivery communal scares.
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50There's virtually nothing new in the dull Paranormal Activity 4 except for a modification in the method of documenting the spooky shenanigans.
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42PA4 develops the story ever so slightly (not enough to satisfy fans) and delivers a few good scares (not enough to satisfy newbies); mostly, it plays like a overlong prologue for the already-in-the-works PA5. Here's hoping this is just the tension-racking lull before the next big scream.
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Oct 20, 201240Screenwriter Christopher Landon, along with co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, make a truly lame attempt at establishing a supernatural mythology to explain all this, but their real energies go to amping up the jarring sound cues, darting shadows, and last-shot shocker (so goofily weird this time that you'll laugh out loud) that make this franchise a perennial crowd-pleaser.
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40Apart from a hi-def night-vision gimmick, returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman don't take advantage of either upgrade.
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Oct 19, 201240But the real problem behind Paranormal Activity 4 is that its entire raison d'être has gotten old; producer Oren Peli, who directed the first one, even included some gentle digs at the found-footage genre in his superior "Chernobyl Diaries," released earlier this year.
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40There's a point at which movies become only merchandise, and the Paranormal franchise may be heading for that nexus, that nadir.
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Oct 17, 201240Fairly mild in tone and riffing -- if not quite ripping -- off a collection of horror classics that includes "The Shining," "Rosemary's Baby" and "Poltergeist," both the franchise's premise and its execution nevertheless remain rudimentary, with the narrative and character backstories representing more of a sketch than a fully realized vision of the supernatural world that Katie inhabits.
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40Less reliant on slow-burn suspense and larded with fake-out jump scares, this is the first sequel in the series that fails to advance the overall mythology in any meaningful way.
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38Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.
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25They could have called this Paranormal Inactivity.
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25Paranormal Activity 4 is listless, dreadful and boring, an almost painfully inert and superficial ghost story that lacks specificity or scares. Time to turn the camera off, guys.
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20PA 4's best idea, besides reintroducing the slow-walking, statuesque Katie, is a strange video trick involving lots of little lights filling a darkened room. It's tough to describe, but the cameras, of course, capture a figure the characters can't.
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11This is one horror franchise that's burned itself out, and then some – not even the rare shock cuts to nothing much at all will startle anyone over the age of 8.