Delayed Reaction: Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

The Pitch: You've got questions. Before we go, we've got answers.

Paranormal Activity is responsible for the most recent boom in found footage movies. The original was kind of a phenomenon and easily is the most effective film in the series. It isn't a series that gains a lot by expanding on the first though. It's nice to get some answers, but each movie has fewer effective scares and more contrived reasons to be filming than the one before. By the time I got to The Ghost Dimension, all I wanted was to see how they wrap the story up.

The Ghost Dimension was a pretty big disappointment. After The Marked Ones gave the series a little life by not being about an affluent white couple*, Ghost Dimension (which was actually filmed around the same time as Marked Ones before being delayed 2 years) dips back into the same bag of tricks and gets lazy about them. I believe this film features the first scenes that drop the "found footage" aesthetic. The "gimmick" this time is that someone rigs a camera that can see the demon Toby and other supernatural occurrences. That's nifty but betrays one of the core principals of the series: the series is effective because of what you can't see. This is almost a different genre than the rest of the series (leaning heavily into the supernatural, almost science fiction) and easily the weakest one. Its only value is for completion and a couple answers to questions no one really cares about. Mostly, it made me want to go back and watch the first and third movies again (the two best by far).

*I get it. They probably need to be rich to afford all those cameras, but that certainly backs the creativity into a corner.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend