For some reason, there’s an “Aunt” ( Olivia Taylor Dudley) also hanging around, although she disappears for so much of the second act that I wondered if she was killed off-screen. The father’s brother ( Dan Gill) comes to stay with them for some reason and is even more of an annoyance. Murray and Brit Shaw) seemingly don’t know how to react properly to anything. They’re not only stupid, but they’re annoying, too. The Ghost Dimension takes that to another level. Horror movies often feature some of humanity’s least intelligent, because that’s convenient – and, at times, a necessity, for the plot. Let’s talk about the characters for a second. The promised conclusion of the Paranormal Activity franchise is the worst one yet. So, in case you were wondering, the answer to the most important question – “Is it funnier than Paul Blart 2?” – is an emphatic “yes.” The only true positive to be found? There are some laughs, both unintentional and intentional. What results for the audience are a bunch of jump startles with no buildup, tension, or reason to fear, a generic plot that you won’t care about, ridiculously stupid and annoying characters, 3D which means that an already darkly lit film has been made darker, and special effects that would be embarrassing if they were used as a tech demo for a Dreamcast game. What we get to watch is basically every “child talks to evil entity” movie ever, except that it’s all done in found-footage format with unknown actors, and it tries to tie up the overly convoluted overarching story of the series, which at this point is so terrible that one has to wonder why anyone thought it was necessary. Don’t think too hard about how it all works, as The Ghost Dimension hasn’t, either, even though it has four credited screenwriters. Its sinister plan involves using the family’s resident child, Leila ( Ivy George), to somehow create a human body for itself. The hook is that one of the cameras can see the demon, who looks a lot like Voldemort. The plot, I’m sure you’ll struggle to believe, involves a family who finds themselves haunted by a demon, so they set up cameras around their house to catch its activities, because demons are such drama queens. Franchise fatigue had set in after just a couple of installments by the sixth entry, what we’re watching feels obligatory. And because this is the sixth movie, we’ve mostly figured it out by now anyway. My point is this, though: by explaining everything and by showing us our demon early and often, it becomes far less scary. The reason, I suppose, is because this is the promised finale to the Paranormal Activity franchise, although that’s a hard claim to believe. It might come as a surprise, then, that the newest one, subtitled The Ghost Dimension, exists to show us exactly what’s been haunting our various families, tell us precisely why, and remove any and all mystery from the series. Like them or not, the Paranormal Activity movies always have, at the very least, tried to keep their ghosts/demons/whatever at least somewhat under wraps, even despite the ever-expanding and ultimately confusing mythology that the series has, for some reason, decided to try to have. You don’t know what it can do, you don’t know why it’s acting this way, you don’t know when or where it could pop up, and so on. After all, part of the reason that it’s scary in the first place is because of the mystery surrounding it. There’s an adage when it comes to horror movies that states that the more you see the monster, the less frightening it becomes.
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