[yasr_overall_rating]
Using a special camera that can see spirits, a family must protect their daughter from an evil entity with a sinister plan.
In 2009, aspiring filmmaker Oren Peli made his first feature film, a supernatural horror titled “Paranormal Activity.” Made with a budget of only $15,000, the movie would go on to earn over $100 million in the U.S. and $85 million overseas. Paramount Pictures snapped up the rights to distribute the film and Peli would single-handedly help reinvigorate the horror genre, with carbon copies of “Paranormal Activity” popping up everywhere. Naturally, with the success of the first movie Paramount put into motion a sequel, which was also lucrative and this became the norm in the years that followed. Six years later, the series that started out convincingly and enjoyably has, unsurprisingly, gone the way of the Dodo. The final nail in the Paranormal Activity coffin is The Ghost Dimension, a film that attempts to bring closure to a series that seemed to be never-ending, much like the finale of every film since the original.
The problem herein lies in the fact that the studio obviously doesn’t want this series to end and could you blame them? Each film is made with a miniscule budget so they will make money either way but Paramount faced a similar predicament back in 1984 when its most famous horror franchise at that time, Friday the 13th, was getting ready to come to a close. With “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” supposedly being the last in the series, after its release in which the movie made more money than any of its predecessors, Paramount found a way to bring Jason back. “The Ghost Dimension” is ‘allegedly’ the last in the series but I fail to believe that. I have no doubt that history will repeat itself and we will continue to see more incarnations in this franchise.
As the films progressed, the filmmakers created new stories with new characters but at the same time, tried to intertwine the events from the first movie. This worked in the beginning but since then, they have become a jumbled mess and because you can only do so much with the one surviving character from the original story, they decided to go back in time and create a backstory for this character. Hence, the filmmakers had free reign to devise all new stories, while still barely hanging on to the thread that was the first movie.
“The Ghost Dimension” takes place a few years after the events of the first movie and we are introduced to a new family, father Ryan (Chris J. Murray), mother Emily (Brit Shaw) and their young daughter Leila (Ivy George). It is December of 2013 and things are going well for the family. They have a beautiful and caring nanny in Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Ryan’s newly-dumped brother Mike (Dan Gill) has decided to stay with them until the new year. We soon learn however, that their house was built on the burned ruins of the house from the first movie. Out of nowhere, Ryan unearths a box from the garage that contains an old video camera but this is no average video camera, it is able to see supernatural beings where the naked eye cannot.
Suffice to say, strange things begin to happen and after Ryan decides to put his ‘new’ camera to good use, they are able to see ghosts and eerie figures in the middle of the night and when young Leila’s behavior turns bizarre, they call in a local priest who deducts that she is possessed and the only answer is an exorcism. As we all know, exorcisms never go well and this is no exception. After a lot of screaming and hand-held camera work that allows us to see absolutely nothing, the movie veers off into preposterous territory and we determine that the events of every “Paranormal Activity” movie were all imperative for the return of the anti-christ, which is how this movie ends and very unimaginatively I might add.
From a creative and somewhat original story in the first movie to an uninspired and repetitious finale, I really hope that Paramount takes this series and bury it in the back yard in hallowed ground. It served its purpose and made a lot of money, now let some other talented up-and-coming filmmaker have the opportunity to showcase their work and maybe, just maybe, you might have another hit on your hands.
In theaters now
