Review - Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
Monday, October 26, 2015 at 4:30PM 
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
Reader Comments (10)
And yet this blog does not cover the biggest black american film of the year. Congratulations!
I haven't seen this one yet, but I will. I have a fondness for this franchise, although like the STAR TREK films (apparently - I haven't seen them) every second one is not as good as the others. The original, the third (the best in the series) and last year's THE MARKED ONES are all great, effective chillers. The second one was a retread without any real new scares, and the fourth was just a dud. Sad to hear this one follows that track especially given I actually think the 3D element to see the ghosts is quite nifty for a film that, as you say, has kept any visual representation of its creepies more or less under wraps in keeping with its lo fi concept.
Faggot you can have my user handle I will retire it.
/3rtfuls: I was suspecting that it was multiple people under there, one being mostly okay but argumentative and the other being distinctly unpleasant. Thanks for clearing that up, you schizophrenic blog label.
Nathaniel needs to require posters to use their email for confirmation of identity. If I wanted to I could be Glenn, Nathaniel, Nick Davis, anyone I choose.
Why would anyone pay for 3 -D for a series known for its crappy photography?
What is going on here?....
I'm so confused. Someone is using the /3rtful name who is not /3rtful? Jesus.
This is a very common and interesting question which comes in everybody mind that how is the life after death? So there is no scientific answer that how is life after death? Many people of different-different communities think that people are around us after death they feel their existence but the question is how it was possible? No one can get the specific answer how life was after death? The scientist can meet those people who get alive after death they told that after death they were float in the air, one of them told that there is a light and he move toward the light but I think it was just an imaginary illusion made by their mind as like when we wake up after saw a dream we couldn’t get the what’s reality and dream. Let’s play a game.
Can you think life after death let’s start thinking and close your eyes. What you get you couldn’t able to think life after death because we cannot think those think which is not exist our brain cannot get the appropriate data to think life after death because there is no existence of our life after death. In the spiritual book the heaven or hell is defined that people went to heaven or hell after death but no one can get the right answer about the existence of heaven or hell but where is heaven or hell in the universe the NASA was travel many times in space and found many planet but they couldn’t found heaven or hell in the universe. Many people think that after death the person became alien because they are out of the planet so they think they became alien and keep an eye on us. The scientists are working on it to find an aliens. So no one get the right answer that how is the life after death? It was a unsolved mystery no one knows when it will be solved.
The ghost stuff is real. Never believed it until I bought a condo that was haunted. Scared out of my wits for months but had no place to go. A good friend talked about Caribbean Psychics. They turned out to be a one stop shop and 2 years later I have no paranormal activity.