I sat down to Paranormal Activity 3 excitedly, awaiting all sorts of ghostly hijinx. In this third installment, we go back to 1988 when the sisters were very young to see how it all started in the first place.
The movie starts off with Kristi (Sprague Grayden) and Daniel (Billy Boland) painting the nursery and awaiting the birth of the baby boy that Katie (Katie Featherston) would eventually kill her sister for and steal from his crib. Katie comes over to see how the nursery is coming along and brings with her a box full of video tapes their grandmother left them.
Fast forward to a year later, and we see the house in a shambles, it looks like it was a break-in. Kristi and Daniel are documenting the damage and looking for things that might have been taken. The only thing that appears to be missing is a box of video tapes. Miraculously, they have noticed this. I don’t know about you but if someone broke into my house and threw everything around I don’t think I’d notice a missing box of VHS tapes that I got a year ago and left in the basement. Just sayin’.
Now the story goes back to 1988 and we see what was on those missing video tapes, some shit that the demon definitely didn’t want the sisters to see. Why he didn’t go on a ghost rampage and steal the box of video tapes from Katie is beyond me. I guess he thought Kristi was the more curious of the two and might eventually watch the tapes (after they had rotted in the basement for awhile, of course, this makes perfect sense!)
Starting off at Katie’s birthday party we see young Kristi talking to herself while she sits under a trampoline. First of all, that’s dangerous. Anyone could come along at any minute and jump on her head. Secondly, the ghost, who we find out soon enough is named “Toby” (beats Pazuzu, doesn’t it?) never talks to Kristi when other people are around suddenly he does birthday parties? Okay.
The girls have a new step-dad, his name is Dennis (Christopher Smith) and he has been dating their mother Julie (Lauren Bittner) for a while and now they are one big happy family. Dennis is a videographer and naturally, this also runs in the family, he starts to videotape all of the occurrences in the house. He’s also a little MacGuyver and he builds an oscillating video camera out of, you guessed it, a video camera and a fan. This is one of the focal points of the film; watching the fan-cam go from living room to kitchen and wondering what is going to jump out at you as soon as the camera oscillates back to the other room, hehe.
We see some cool stuff start to happen, a babysitter gets a ghostly “blow job”, and the girls try to play Bloody Mary a couple of times to no avail when suddenly Toby lashes out (literally) and scratches Dennis’ assistant, Randy. We can also see that Toby is trying to get Kristi to do things and is threatening her. At one point Kristi tells Dennis that she has to keep Toby’ secrets if she wants to be safe. Things start to spiral out of control and eventually Julie gets so freaked out that she decides they are getting out of there and going to her mother’s house.
Going to grandma’s house was a big mistake. As it usually is, didn’t we learn that the big bad wolf is waiting for us on our way to Grandmother’s house? At least, we find out why Toby is there in the first place and what he wants. It wasn’t as fascinating to see the origins as I thought it was going to be.
I think that you should see this movie in order to find out how the demon Toby came to be in the girls’ lives and for some closure to the story. But as for the rest of it, this one isn’t the one to see for action, violence and new ghost tricks.
