Paranormal Activity 4

It's no secret that I absolutely loathed the first two entries into the Paranormal Activity series. I found them to be quite slow, very flat, not scary, and just unintentionally hillarious. Then part 3 comes around, and low and behold....I was actually quite impressed! My standards for part 4 were surprisingly high and unfortunately, I felt the movie fell a bit short of what I was hoping it would be.

Paranormal Activity 4 begins with where previous entries left off. Katie (Katie Featherton) has stolen her sister's child; Hunter, after killing her sister, her sister's husband, and her own boyfriend as well. The two are now located in Henderson, Nevada where Hunter (who now goes by Robbie) begins spending a lot of time with the neighbors. As unsurprisingly, the more "Robbie" is around, the more unexplainable events begin to happen to the family.

The performances in this entry are quite stronger than previous entries. Kathryn Newton holds her own, as Alex, the teenage girl who is on the receiving end of most of the spirits' mischief. She keeps the audience interested in her character and actually plays the role quite naturally. Katie Featherton once again shines as Katie, the girl who you know is up to no good. Every scene with her is bonechilling, Featherton milks every moment to its finest.

There are some pretty solid thrills here as well. It's not 100% terrifying from beginning to end, but a lot of the "Gotcha!" moments pay off and there some quite impressive visuals on display in this one, especially the scenes with the Wiiconnect playing as a camera to monitor all of the ghosts' whereabouts. And as usual, the last 20 minutes are easily the most frightening as all Hell breaks loose and it becomes a guessing game of who, if anyone will live to tell the tale.

Now for the negative; one of my biggest disappointments with PA4 is how little it explains to the audience. Part 3 left you with a lot of cliffhangers about the unlucky family's past, how this is happening, and why no one has noticed that more and more people just happen to be possessed by demons who give them the strength of Superman. PA4 provides little answers and doesn't seem to concerned with tying up the loose ends that previous entries have started having us think about.

But, my biggest issue with PA4 is just how similar it feels to past entries. Granted, it's much superior to the first two, but still, I didn't feel like this one really presented anything fresh to the series. It's pretty much the same ol' stuff, just with different people. Certain scenes seem like carbon copies of scenes that were used in the first three, and if they were creepy the first time....seeing them repeated in this one just makes the material feel stale at times. Paranormal Activity 4 had the potential to be stellar but instead it just decides to lay down and play dead.

2/4

High Tension





 It seems like foreign horror movies receive the reputation of either being absolutely gruesome, a million times better than American horror movies, or both of the two options. And I have to say, High Tension easily lives up to both of these standards. It’s bloody as hell but still quite effective at being very spine-chilling at the same time.

High Tension is about two semi-lesbianic (yes I’m aware that isn’t a word) friends named Marie and Alexa. While staying at Alexa’s parents’ house one weekend, a male intruder breaks into the house, murders all of Alexa’s family, and then kidnaps her, all of which was viewed by Marie who was hiding under the bed the entire time. Marie is determined to save her friend as she chases down the killer while viewing all the carnage and death he leaves behind him.

                High Tension pulls no punches when it comes to the blood. Every murder pretty much ends in an explosion of blood which is awesome, and from what I’ve read, a few scenes were edited down which actually makes me quite sad that we could have seen worse. But I digress, High Tension doesn’t back down when it comes to showing the gruesome shit on screen, there is very little left to the imagination. People are slashed, throats are slit, people are beheaded by furniture, kids are shot, heads are used as masturbatory aids, and you get the point. This is a huge positive though, gorehounds aren’t into using their imagination to picture what a death in a movie looks like, and they want to see it happen.

                Even though High Tension easily earns its’ R rating in the gore department, I actually would feel like the movie would feel quite menacing without it. The direction is quite clever actually, placing the viewer in the seat of Marie as she is following the killer and her kidnapped friend while he is doing all of this terrible shit to people. It actually makes the viewer feel like they’re in the back of a rollercoaster like Marie would feel in this movie and that’s something easily worthy of recognition. High Tension is solid at making the viewer feel like they are actually there watching everything occur in front of their own eyes.

                As for the controversial ending, I was actually pretty sold by it. Granted, it was completely ridiculous and was taking a similar path to many horror movies today, I still was a fan. This type of resolution is something that can really be sold if the actors are into it, and Cécile de France (the actress who plays Marie) sells the hell out of it.

          High Tension is a solid, thrilling, gruesome film from beginning to end, sold by the direction and strong performances along with a great pace that never lags. Sure it’s ridiculous as hell and if you pick it apart, it doesn’t really make a lick of sense. But that’s what the genre tends to entail, and for utter lunacy, High Tension is a great bet to put your money on.

3/4

Primal

These days I'm convinced that climbing Mount Rushmore is accomplished with less trouble than making a horror movie that keeps my interest from beginning to end. Failing to provide the goods, is Primal, a horror movie which really should stayed in the stone age and never came to this one.

Primal is about six friends on a camping journey in the wildnerness. When one of them falls sick after skinny dipping with leeches, the other five panic as her condition goes from worst to monster-worthy. She begins her "illness" by bleeding and ends it when she's completely deformed and hungry for anything with a pulse. She attacks, which then brings up the question of whether or not the others can kill a friend or not. Most of them seem to get on board, but others (mainly the boyfriend), are a bit less for the idea.

Primal unfortunately provides very little of merit, but I guess one thing I would consider satisfactory is the makeup. The creatures actually look really swell and I was impressed that that the monster/cavemen creatures weren't styled as shabbily as most movies of the genre tend to look. Granted, this is probably one of the few things I enjoyed about this movie, but still, could be worse I guess.

Now for the dreadful; and there's a bundle of problems worthy of being mentioned. All of the characters are ridiculously unlikeable. They behave in such stupid and barbaric ways it's hard to imagine there's something less intelligent running around. All five of them could have been killed at once and it would have been easy to not give a shit at all. The movie just feels routine and bland at all, created without any sense of fun or fright. Add in a routine finale and a movie that leaves you with more questions than answers, and you have something that is as substantial as a movie that was made by cavemen for the cavemen.

1/4