Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension deserves a review just as rushed and thoughtless as it.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is the sixth and supposedly final installment in the loose Paranormal Activity series. Paranormal Activity has alwasy been premised on a certain sort of laziness. The original is a dirt cheap movie that accomplishes a little by keeping its ambitions small and its budget smaller. Still, it’s half-charming in its brazen phoniness. Anything that can get a scare out of a person standing in place and quavering has some smart insights into how horror works. The sequels (highlight: Paranormal Activity 2) find some clever gimmicks too: a sequence involving an oscillating fan is 21st century garbage horror canon already. But Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension doesn’t understand anything at all about what makes the Paranormal Activity series periodically work.

paranormal Activity ghost dimension - here’s a tweet from those buttholes

There’s this one part where the ghost has CGI tentacles with little claws that look like the blocky shit I took after literally eating a CD of polygon assets from the original Resident Evil.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension claims “for the first time you will see the activity.” Not only does this miss the point of the whole series, but it’s certain you won’t like what you see. For this activity is little more than squiggly, black nothing. The CGI in Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is the digital equivalent of scribbling black sharpie on the screen. Did these ghosts come free with After Effects? Compare it to the actually designed ghosts of Crimson Peak. Hope you enjoy watching a bunch of bullshit nothing float vaguely in 3D space in this, the nadir of 3D, the absolute hell-barrel bottom of a film technique that sucks even when it’s good.

Paranormal Acivity: The Ghost Dimension Trailer

Is The Ghost Dimension itself supposed to be the stupid 1988 past? Or is the ghost dimension VHS tapes and concepts ripped straight from the infinitely better but also a really stupid movie Sinister?

And that poor girl, whose parents just handed her over to a dumb, time-traveling demon lord because all they carea bout is playing with an old camera that isn’t very good for anything except seeing bits of glitter flutter about in a suburban house.

One of the only things a found footage movie has as a narrative asset is the ability of the characters to REVIEW THE FOOTAAGE, jesuss. So why the hell do we have to sit through the wife and brother’s half an hour of not believing that there are ghosts. SHOW THEM THE FUCKING VIDEO OF THE GHOSTS.

Paranormal Activity movies have always been jump scare generators, but Ghost Activity takes it to a new level of idiocy. Many of the “scares” are poorly timed black blobs fluttering across the screen, accompanied by a shriek or an audio spike. But they’re so lazily and obviously placed that you pretty much know right when they’re going to come and they don’t even manage to be as nerve rattling as lazy jumps usually are! Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension watches as if they just filmed a Paranormal Activity movie and then decided where to place the scares later. There is no horror, no tension, no pacing, just utter blackhearted, condescending laziness.

Everyone dies at the end, except the little girl who is now a demon or some bullshit who knows it doesn’t make any sense anyway. Oh, spoiler warning. Whoopsieeeeeeeeeeeee.

Also, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension promises a giant, goat-headed demon lord and then only shows you its feet. The dumbass demon is literally some extra’s fucking ankles. This movie sucks I hate it i hate it it makes me so mad to even be writing words about it as if it weren’t truthfully beneath even the most cursory analysis.

The priest was clearly supposed to deliver this movie’s thrilling rah-rah, audience cheering line “we don’t need an exorcism, what we need is an EXTERMINATION.” Except he boofed it because the actor is a soft-spoken nothing (when you bring in a priest or a paranormal expert it’s their job to be Scenery-Chewing Crazy People) and getting a good line reading would have required a second take.

Someone will start passing around an epic teardown (I’m under no illusion that this is it… it takes a lot of effort to be mean engagingly) of Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension, but please ignore it. This movie doesn’t even deserve collective wrath. It just deserves to be buried out in the desert with the old copies of E.T. and everyone who was supposed to be creative and come up with actual stuff to put in front of paying movie audiences should be buried with it, because they hate you and their movie is the proof.