![]() We know Katie’s grandmother indoctrinated her and her sister in witchy ways as children. Part four is the first true sequel, after a parallel plot in “2” (still the series’ pinnacle) and a legitimate prequel in “3.” A recap: Possessed by Toby, Katie (Katie Featherston) killed her fiancé, sister and brother-in-law (but not her step-niece) before kidnapping her nephew, Hunter, and going missing from Carlsbad, California in 2006. And the “Paranormal” franchise now feels like its own plug-and-play product, with as simple a way to reformat its narrative hard drive as it sees fit. Cameras here are embedded in laptops, iPhones and Xbox Kinects, with all the shameless product placement that goes along with it. ![]() Plus, the few drops of novelty left in the first-person approach - given old-school jolts via oscillating fan in “3” by returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman - are wrung dry. And when he does go after people, it’s the anticlimactic ragdoll yank-and-snap you’ve seen in the two previous films. Here, he just makes a knife disappear, causes laptops to whir and blocks paths with chairs. He once had the gumption to work his way up to a murderous frenzy by bashing a German Shepherd, upending a kitchen in broad daylight and clawing a cameraman’s flesh. And here, Toby - the jovially innocuous name of a deadly demon at the center of the series’ destruction and death - has just gotten lazy. ![]() Outside of fleetingly clever bursts, this franchise has never been able to sustain its scares. It’s déjà boo all over again with “Paranormal Activity 4.” And the returns in this franchise of first-person POV frights remain as depressing as they are diminishing. ![]()
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