Review - Paranormal Activity 3

I swore up and down, left and right that I would not be taking part in the Halloween tradition this year. You may be asking what tradition I am referring to, so let me explain a little. It seems about every 3-5 years the torch is passed to the next franchise to milk the holiday bucks till the teat is dry. Before we had Paranormal Activity the franchise was Saw. You can see this all the way back to the original Halloween. Now with Paranormal Activity firmly locked in as the Halloween holiday series the cycle can repeat itself. In this case of our third entry into this series, I had the overwhelming feeling I had seen and done this before. Lets take a look into the monster that dominated the theaters this holiday.

**SPOILERS**
Keep an eye out here folks, I have been known to ruin a movie or two by dropping spoilers with no warning!So, we open with 2005 and a box of tapes is being dropped off by Katie at Kristi and her husband's home. Shortly thereafter a burglary takes place and the tapes go missing but nothing else is touched (DAH DUM!!!!!). We then roll back the clock to 1988 and both Katie and Kristi are children living with there mother Julie and her boyfriend, Dennis. We start to hear mention of Katie's invisible friend Toby and that's when strange things begin.

Following an earthquake and a botched sex tape attempt Dennis notices an image in the video he made. Dennis and his friend Randy decide to set cameras up in the house to try and figure out what is going on. From here is where we go into "creep you out land". As you would expect we are going to experience things moving/ breaking on their own, lights going on and off, shadows that make no sense and just general paranormal activity. I will not spoil the very lacking amount of unusual things that happen in the movie. It is safe to say you will not see anything more intense or scary than you had in the last two movies. Yes, more of the same but that is a lot better than more of something worse. The cast all did the part they were asked to. Chloe Csengery who played the young Katie stood out a lot more than the other characters when it came to seeming believable. I know the story is really based around her and this entity named Toby but she did a great job selling her part. The only other person that I felt displayed a real person filled with dread and emotion would have been Dustin Ingram who played Randy. The one scene was in the bathroom as they attempt to play "Bloody Mary". The fear coming from his cracking voice as he tried to calm Kristi sure felt real. This was probably my favorite scene to be honest.The sound has been a very important part of this entire franchise. As we know it is not what you see in these movies that gets you. It is what you miss in a scene and the audio that accompanies it. For us the audio seemed lacking but I believe that to be the theater we were at. It was like someone had things turned down which wrecks any chance of an actual scare. It also did not help that the gentleman behind us felt the need to talk about child support, all the pot he smoked on the way and how much his current girlfriend sucked. All and all I would have to say the audio was as good as the last two outings in the series. I would also like to point out a change in the production team that I think helped this one rise about the last entry in the series. This time direction was helmed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Personally I liked their last documentary Catfish enough to give this a look regardless of having swore the series off after Paranormal Activity 2.

If you enjoyed the last 2 movies or love "found footage" movies, this one is worth checking out. Please do not go into it expecting a reinvention of the wheel or anything much different than the last two. I think they know what works and how much it takes to get a scare out of an audience. At times I even felt cheated when things built up only to fall flat as a dumb joke. The "Bloody Mary" scene and the last 10 minutes were probably the best parts of the movie. I had hoped to see this one go deeper into the lore and mysticism that makes up these entities and spirits. I hope they are not bottle necking info on the background in order to milk a few more flicks. If that's the case you guys are already riding on a threadbare saddle and deserve to crash.

originally posted by contributor Christopher Young

Review - Grave Encounters

The "found footage" approach to horror filmmaking, for better or for worse, has created a new subcategory in the horror genre. We've seen witches, ghosts, exorcisms and more. So why does Grave Encounters work then? I asked myself that question multiple times during The Vicious Brother's found footage foray. I feel as though opinions on this are going to be largely divided, so I would like to preface this review with a little bit of information that might help support my thoughts.

I hosted a live paranormal radio show for three years. In that industry it's not unusual to see huge conflicts between the truth and entertainment. The paranormal reality show has proven to be an enormous money maker and has often been more detrimental to proving the existence of it's concepts than many fans would like to think. TV is TV. It is entertainment and often it is experience that shapes our faith...not an 8 o clock slot on the Travel Channel. HOWEVER, it is this entertainment that often prompts us to question out beliefs and expand our horizons. The message here? Don't shoot the messenger...even when it's a pompous melodramatic douchebag that preys on people's faith with cheap parlor tricks. ok...so maybe it's ok to shoot the messenger, but it doesn't excuse any of us from drawing our own conclusions about the things that go bump in the night.

Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson) is just the kind of douchebag that causes the true believer to roll their eyes. Shooting their sixth episode for their series Grave Encounters, Lance and his team of paranormal adventurers take on an abandoned insane asylum with a history of haunted happenings. It's easy to see early on just where this is going. The set up practically demands it and we are treated to some nice bits of humor early on as we see what some of us already know: entertainment does not wait on the unexplained to happen...sometimes it has to be "encouraged". This also allows us to explore the motives of our lead characters as we learn that they too understand the importance of providing their viewers with entertainment, no matter the cost... Even when the cost is slipping some petty cash to the Gardner to improvise when approached to relate some of his own experiences.

Like any morale parable on the dangers of getting what you wish for, the Grave Encounters crew soon find out that their location has it's own idea of entertainment. In this sense The Vicious Brothers (somehow I feel extremely ridiculous for capitalizing this every time, but I also refer to myself in the third person, so... Yeah.... We all have our little delusions of grandeur) are not trying to reinvent the wheel. We've seen a lot of these scare trappings before... It is, however, the willingness of the directors to take the scares to the next level that kept my interest. Sure we get a lot of movement in the camera's periphery and a lot of noises off camera, but this is a staple of a lot of contemporary paranormal programming, so it seems to fit here a little more naturally. It is also an opportunity to set us up for what soon becomes a barrage of money shots... A series of visual reveals that successfully give us what a lot of it's peers only hint at in this sub genre. Make no mistake, we definitely get payoffs in Grave Encounters, and it sets itself far apart from so many of the other found footage flicks that it finds it's own voice and keeps you watching, regardless of now many tired conventions the film uses to set up the scares.

Grave Encounters has enough "jumps" to satisfy the casual movie watcher and a few "oh shit" moments" to keep the rest of us interested. Recommended.



You can watch the trailer for Grave Encounters here and embedded below.




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Location:N Gilbert St,Danville,United States