Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension review

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (15/R, 88 mins)
Director: Gregory Plotkin
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The advertising for the latest found footage spook-snooze in the Paranormal Activity series boasts that for the first time you will see the activity. Basically if anything at all were to happen on screen it would be an exponential increase in excitement from the thoroughly dull and lifeless affairs that the franchise has devolved into. The first was a nice surprise and for a while they were being knocked out at one a year, at the cost of about £6.50, and therefore to healthy box office returns even as audience interest started to wane. They’re less frequent now, but this one follows the same template of a family in a house being bothered by poltergeisty antics. When they find a bunch of old VHS tapes featuring two young girls who seem able to see what they're doing, they set up cameras at night to record the mysterious goings on in their daughter’s bedroom. We then get to watch that footage in all its glory, and in fairness we do get to see the activity, consisting mostly of fuzzy shapes and sudden loud noises. It’s all relentlessly, criminally boring and riddled with more plot holes than there’s room for here - do they never actually look at what they’ve filmed afterwards? And worst of all because it’s supposedly being filmed on an old 80s camera, we’re forced to watch it through a headache-inducing blur. Almost as bad is an exhausting gimmick where the 3D only kicks in when the ghost does its thing, but at least constantly putting on and taking off the glasses is a nice distraction from watching the movie.