Halloween 2013: Paranormal Activity 4

I'm just a sucker for these movies.  I don't LOVE them, but they're good for a decent scare or two.  The real problem with them is the movie around the scares.  Characters you kind of want to slap so they'll shut up already and get to the scares.  And there's definitely a problem of diminishing returns.  By the fourth movie, it's like, "oh, a door opening by itself AGAIN.  I'm SO scared."  For the most part, it's just the same tricks over and over and this movie definitely didn't scare me very much.  Some good eerie moments but not real scares.  But I'll probably watch the fifth one when it gets put up on Netflix instant streaming.  Cuz you never know!  Some sequels are actually fun.

I think the main problem with this one is that they've stretched the found footage conceit almost to the breaking point.  I can buy people who think their house is haunted, so they put up cameras all around the house and check them periodically.  Yeah, it stretches credibility, but if it's fun and scary, I don't mind.  This one, though, just, I dunno.  Mostly we get the stoopid teenage main character chatting with her boyfriend online, so we have to look at her dumb face A LOT.  And her dumb boyfriend is even worse.  And spoiler alert, I guess?  So, psycho Aunt Katie kidnapped her nephew Hunter after killing off the rest of the family, and then she shows up across the street from the people in this movie, with a kid she's calling Robbie.  So I assumed Robbie was Hunter.  But then it seems like later they're trying to say the boy in the other family is actually Hunter??  So then who the fuck is Robbie??  Things like this bug me and take me out of the movie.  They make me all stabby and psycho-facey.

So I wouldn't recommend this movie unless you saw and didn't hate the other three.  Otherwise the whole thing wouldn't make ANY sense, probably.