If you're scoring at home, the linear chronology of the Paranormal Activity movies goes 3, 2, 1, 4, 5, and 6.
There are a couple of good moments in Paranormal Activity 4. There might have been more had the movie been made five years later, when smart-phone video technology was better. Why do I say this? Because teenaged girl protagonist (Supernatural's Kathryn Newton, aka the angry, monster-fighting daughter of Castiel's human host) spends about a third of the movie carrying a goddamned laptop around so she can talk to her boyfriend and film supernatural incidents at the same time. Yeah, that isn't... awkward.
Anyway, the demons and ghosts are now nigh-omnipotent, which means that the movie soporifically muddles towards pretty much the same ending as the first three. Newton does what she can, but she's adrift in a sea of nihilistic found-footage nonsense. Not recommended, and really no fun at all.
The Taylor family (Mom Radha Mitchell, Dad Kevin Bacon, bulimic teenaged daughter Lucy Fry and autistic son David 'Bruce Wayne' Mazouz) vacations at the Grand Canyon. However, autistic son Mikey walks off with five stones from a secret Anasazi chamber. Removing the stones from the chamber frees five demons from imprisonment in the Phantom Zone. Well, whatever.
As it apparently takes months for these demons to power up, the Taylor family gets bedevilled at an ever-increasing rate by water taps that turn themselves on, bulimia, potential marital infidelity, and loud bumps in the night. Mikey now has an imaginary friend he calls 'Jenny.'
So a bunch of stuff happens that's a lot like Poltergeist, only with nods to the mysterious Anasazi civilization rather than Indian burial grounds. Mikey is enamored of his demonic friends. No one else is. Thankfully, the Internet is quite authoritative on the subject of Anasazi demons! Though based on the screenshots we see, Mom and Pop get all their information from the same web page.
Director Greg McLean made his name with Wolf Creek and also directed the underwhelming Belko Experiment. He achieves some nice horror effects here. He also seems to forget what establishing shots are at key moments. Oh, well. There's a wise Hispanic psychic and her wise psychic grand-daughter to help straighten things out with the help of some sort of demonic diving rod made out of coat-hangers.
The portrayal of autism in The Darkness isn't exactly offensive. It just seems... undercooked. Mikey is either robotically gormless or suddenly HUMAN. David Mazouz does what he can with the character, but you really start to hate Mikey, which I don't think was the intention. Lucy Fry is much better than she needs to be in the role of bulimic sister/demonic punching bag. Radha Mitchell is also fine in a somewhat underwritten part.
And Kevin Bacon! He's quite convincing as a sleazy, affair-prone, distracted white-collar (he's an architect) Dad and somewhat less convincing as Good, Self-Sacrificing Dad. His hair is crazy, though not unjustified -- he looks like a 50-year-old guy trying to look young and failing miserably when he remembers his pomade and failing really, really miserably when he forgets his pomade and his hair looks like a toupee made of badly-dyed straw.
I mean, it's really a bad movie, but it's an enjoyable bad movie. Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.