Okay so Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension. Supposedly this is the “last one” but I can imagine if it made any amount of money there will be more. The problem is that this movie is truly awful. A new family, the Fleeges (what kind of name is that?) are in a big home up in Santa Rosa. I want to say they’ve been living there for a few years, but for some reason just randomly find this box in their garage that has this old school big-ass VHS camera and a bunch of VHS tapes. The family (husband, his brother, wife, her sister and the daughter) gets a little bit of setup, then of course the dad starts messing around with the camera.
He quickly discovers that the camera has been modified and along with the usual stuff sees particles of black dust or mist floating around certain parts of the house. This is the established tactic for “seeing” all of the ghost activity throughout the movie, which I guess is a semi-clever way of requiring the use of a camera (though not quite all of the footage is with this camera as things transpire). Of course the black mist is CG, and I imagine this would have been a bit more scary in 3D, but yeah it just looks a bit amateurish and fakey.
As it turns out, the cult who raised the sisters Kristie and Katie from the previous movies actually sold the house to the family apparently in order to summon a demon utilizing their daughter. Inexplicably, the cult just happened to leave behind a special ghost-seeing camera and tapes of the sisters during seances/sessions/etc. in which they are describing events from their future–ie. the father in his room watching the tapes. Of course, as soon as they start seeing the black mist with the camera, shit starts to go down. The black mist grows in power and take some human form and push people around and stuff, and over the course of a few nights things get progressively worse, but not like… people getting really hurt violent.
Then they bring in the priest. Priests are universally useless in these movies and either appear to provide exposition and quickly vanish or try to do something and rapidly get killed. This guy was kinda both. He basically explains its a demon and tries to do stuff with holy water. Eh. Then he leaves and stuff happens where they flee the house. The daughter also manages to write a door-shaped outline of symbols above her bed. The parents are understandably freaked out, but their only action is to remember that they saw the symbols somewhere before. It doesn’t occur to anyone to, I dunno, wipe off the wall or something.
Of course through circumstances they wind up going back to the house with the priest where they will attempt to expel the demon or something by capturing him in a circle. The demon arrives and gets trapped in the circle in what is I guess an okay sequence. They throw a blanket on top and the outline is there, and it seems like the demon collapses and dies. Everything is calm for a few seconds, then rapidly everyone but the wife and daughter are killed. Seriously. The priest gets thrown through a window. The sister sprouts veins on her head and then vomits acid all over the brother. Husband tries to run and the mist suddenly punches through his chest.
It’s such a weird ramped up orgy of violence. Compared to the first PA, you have this slow controlled ramp that progressively gets violent but you see it progressing this way. In Ghost Dimension, people are scared and fall over or stuff, but it goes to 11 just like that.
Finally, the daughter separates from the mother and the door-shaped display of symbols above her bed is of course now a doorway into… I dunno. I would say ghost dimension but… well, the mother follows eventually and winds up… in a room full of young girls, a lot like the place on the video tapes. She finds the daughter, but then the demon comes. She drops the camera so you only see his legs and her, and then of course he picks her up and chokes/kills her, takes the daughter away and… the end.
I think I forgot to mention the dimensional door thing opened previously, the daughter went inside and they found her back in the house a few hours later or something. There are a couple of other stupid things.
I mean, the movie was just … insipid. There’s not a lot going for it, and all of the characters are fundamentally stupid beyond all belief.
— Alan
