The Demon and the Darkness

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): written by Christopher Landon and Chad Feehan; directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman; starring Kathryn Newton (Alex), Katie Featherston (Katie), Matt Shively (Ben), Aiden Lovekamp (Wyatt), and Brady Allen (Robbie): Jesus, there are two more Paranormal Activity movies after this one. The Law of Diminishing Returns will not stop this franchise!

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 Darkness (2016): written by Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong, and Shane Krause; directed by Greg McLean; starring Kevin Bacon (Peter Taylor), Radha Mitchell (Bronny Taylor), David Mazouz (Michael Taylor), Lucy Fry (Stephanie Taylor), Paul Reiser (Peter's Boss), Ilza Ponko (Gloria Ortega), and Alma Martinez (Teresa Morales): The Darkness isn't a good movie, but it's at least a better remake of Poltergeist (1982) than Poltergeist (2015). 

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.

The Demon in The Exorcist was from Iraq, after all.

Paranormal Activity 2: based on the film Paranormal Activity by Oren Peli, written by Michael R. Perry, Christopher Landon, and Tom Pabst; directed by Tod Williams; starring Brian Boland (Daniel), Molly Ephraim (Ali), Katie Featherston (Katie), Sprague Grayden (Kristi), and Micah Sloat (Micah) (2010): Watching the first three Paranormal Activity movies out of sequence over a 4-year period really made things extra exciting.

While watching this second installment, it took me about half the movie to figure out when the third movie occurred (18 years before the other two) and who it involved (the sister-protagonists Katie and Kristi as children and their family). Much of the second movie takes place before the first movie and focuses for the most part on Kristi, the demon-plagued sister of the demon-plagued woman in part one, Katie. I'll give the (now) tetralogy bonus points for wild and wooly non-linear narrative order, especially as four different directors and about eight different writers worked on the first three installments.

While this movie begins to offer some explanations for the occasionally self-destructive behaviour of the sisters-as-adults, it isn't until the third film that one finds out why two characters plagued by verifiable, hostile supernatural activity are so goddamned awful at finding ways to combat it.

As a crucifix proves pretty useful towards the end of this film, I'd expect the rational Dad and the most reasonable person in the film given the circumstances, Kristi's step-daughter Ali, to be wearing clothes made entirely of crosses, rosaries, and handguns when we catch up with them at the end of the movie. Seriously, folks. Paint giant crosses on your doors and windows. And stop going to that one occult site on the Internet that didn't really help Micah in the first movie. There are five million websites devoted to ghost- and demon-busting on the Internet. Jesus, these people are terrible at using search engines!

Thematically, these omissions of reason make a fair amount of occasionally frustrating sense. The adults in the three movies aren't very bright (the teenagers and the older nanny are much smarter), have absolutely no religious beliefs, and are apparently incapable of expanding their demon-busting beyond the Exorcism for Dummies level.

This is a portrait of a terminally stupid and ignorant segment of the American population pretty much doing everything either wrong or in half-measures when confronted by real evil and exposed to real fear. You can apply that to the real-world political situation as you see fit, but while it may be accidental, it's also quite telling -- and makes some of the characterization absurdities seem much less absurd. These people don't know where or when to shoot and can't shoot straight when they do open fire.

Nothing in this second movie approaches the great oscillating-fan shots of the third movie, or the 'standing around' sequences in the first one. The scariest things in this movie are actually an automated pool vacuum and a hot tub. Make of that what you will. Lightly recommended.

Docudramamine

Paranormal Activity 3, written by Christopher B. Landon, based on characters and situations created by Oren Peli, starring Chloe Csengery (Katie), Jessica Tyler Brown (Kristi), Lauren Bittner (Julie), and Dustin Ingram (Randy Rosen) (2011): The 'documentary/found footage' subgenre of horror films, so popular right now, harks back to the 19th-century beginnings of what we now recognize as the horror story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was told in the form of letters and diary entries; Bram Stoker's Dracula added fake newspaper clippings to that mix; Edgar Allan Poe played with fiction and fact within stories that were sometimes published as 'fact.'

H.P. Lovecraft moved the documentary style in a more holistic fictional direction, having his narrators tell ostensibly true tales about fictional events and mythologies and framing everything inside the conceit that the fiction was the real truth about the universe, and recognized fact the fiction.

I have a great fondness for these attempts at documentary horror -- at their best, they're much better than almost every other filmed attempt at horror in the last twenty or thirty years, in part because they move so resolutely away from the grapohic violence of the slasher films that have dominated the horror film genre since the late 1970's. Suggestion and subtlety are what work best in these movies, and Paranormal Activity 3 comes up with some lovely moments of 'found' horror.

The fictional backstory of the three Paranormal films situates the entire narrative within the subtext of long-term child sexual, physical and emotional abuse, abuse that spans generations and is part of the horror. It's a classic example of Stephen King's 'sub-text school' of horror, in which the supernatural stands in for something too mundanely awful to be depicted on film.

Thankfully, one can also say 'pooh!' to sub-text and simply enjoy the movies as a depiction of the pervasive and perhaps unkillable influence of supernatural evil. That the threatened protagonists are spiritually and intellectually unsuited to a confrontation with elemental and generational evil is part of the point of the movies, I think -- no one is coming to save them because they're too dumb, or too conditioned to an unintellectual passivity, to make any real effort to save themselves. They're reactive, not pro-active.

I won't bother with the plot of the movie, or even the characterization. It all makes more sense if you've seen the first two films, though if you haven't you may be a lot more shocked at some of the plot developments. There is clever, killer use of a camera mounted on a rotating fan within the story world, with menace building as we move at a set pace back and forth from foyer to dining room and back again, and things start to appear that shouldn't be there.

There's also one of the smarter, more realistic character reactions to a haunting that I've seen in some time -- a secondary character seems to have seen Eddie Murphy's hilarious bit about The Amityville Horror and reacts accordingly when threatening weirdness occurs. Highly recommended.

Movie, Movie

Paranormal Activity written and directed by Oren Peli, starring Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat (2007): A pretty effective horror movie, especially at the bargain basement price of about $15,000. We're back in Blair Witch Project territory -- a fake documentary made up of 'found' footage, in this case of a couple dealing with an increasingly hostile supernatural entity that's attached to the woman and not the house in which all the action takes place. If you're like me, you'll eventually find the camera-obsessed boyfriend so annoying that you'll start to root a bit for The Thing.

Misdirection and suggestion carry the day here -- we never really see what's menacing the couple, and the horror of most scenes lies in relatively small actions caught by the camera, and not by big visual effects moments. The couple are curiously dopey when it comes to trying to combat the entity -- we've all seen enough horror TV shows and movies to at least try salt, iron or the always reliable cedar wood, or at least we'd probably look up and try such remedies by, oh, about Day 10 of the haunting.

Still, very effective. I'm glad Paramount didn't try to remake the movie with name actors (apparently, Stephen Spielberg helped get the movie released with its original cast but with a new ending he suggested) -- the anonymity aids suspension of disbelief. One bit of action, though -- an object igniting while both people are away but the camera is still rolling -- goes a bit too far in terms of the creature's powers, and not far enough in terms of a realistic reaction to the event. I'm pretty sure finding out you've got an entity that can light things on fire in your house might elicit more than the 'ho-hum' that happens here. All in all, highly recommended.


Away We Go written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, directed by Sam Mendes, starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O'Hara and Maggie Gyllenhall (2009): Cutesy and somewhat pretentious in the Mighty Mendes (American Beauty) Manner. Krasinski and Rudolph, both quite good, play a boho couple expecting their first child. They end up trekking across the US and into Canada and back, in part to see how other families handle child-rearing. The verdict: everyone's cuckoo, though some are more cuckoo than others -- Alison Janney as a falsely jolly harridan and Maggie Gyllenhall as a bonkers New Agey mother lead the pack of undesireables. There are enough laughs and cringes here to keep one interested, along with a creepy out-of-left-field set piece with a creepy child who blurts out a really creepy speech about babies and breathing. Recommended.