A pretty solid coverage of the first film, but then it tapers off. It works to offer an explanation to some of the issues that I had (mainly learning that I was right in assuming they never had a story plan at any point which explains why the mythology makes zero sense), but most of the 90 minutes is them patting themselves on the back. We get a very good history of the behind the scenes of the first film, but we get less and less on each subsequent film. It doesn't really feel like a documentary about the series as it does one of those specials the TV Guide channel would do to build hype for whatever project was coming out. This feels like a hype package for Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. It offers some cool information and I loved seeing a grown up Robbie, but it's a lot of filler. Any time they bring out a "Horror Historian", they lose me and I'm not sure why some of the other interview subjects were even there. I wanted more depth on each movie and I needed more "Making of" and less about what the studio heads were talking about between projects. My biggest issue is that it was one of the same giant problems the Paranormal Activity movies have, awful sound mixing. With the movies, you could at least claim that it's only an issue because they only mixed it for theaters and what I'm watching in my living room wasn't remixed for that setting. Fine, I still think it's shit, but I guess that's valid. This doc was never shown in theaters, it was made for home video, so why do they still have all the interview segments at a low volume and every movie clip twice as loud and the jump scares movie clips three times as loud? You mother fuckers mixed this like this on purpose. I had to watch a damn documentary with my finger on the volume button because you intentionally made movie clips much louder to essentially put jump scares in your documentary. There a some pieces of actual documentary quality work here, but overall it feels like a puff piece to get people excited for the new movie, so they gloss any real issues and remind you that they do little jump scares really well (or at least really often). This isn't a retrospective or an in-depth anything; it's a sanitized ad campaign.
A pretty solid coverage of the first film, but then it tapers off. It works to offer an explanation to some of the issues that I had (mainly learning that I was right in assuming they never had a story plan at any point which explains why the mythology makes zero sense), but most of the 90 minutes is them patting themselves on the back. We get a very good history of the behind the scenes of the first film, but we get less and less on each subsequent film. It doesn't really feel like a documentary about the series as it does one of those specials the TV Guide channel would do to build hype for whatever project was coming out. This feels like a hype package for Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. It offers some cool information and I loved seeing a grown up Robbie, but it's a lot of filler. Any time they bring out a "Horror Historian", they lose me and I'm not sure why some of the other interview subjects were even there. I wanted more depth on each movie and I needed more "Making of" and less about what the studio heads were talking about between projects. My biggest issue is that it was one of the same giant problems the Paranormal Activity movies have, awful sound mixing. With the movies, you could at least claim that it's only an issue because they only mixed it for theaters and what I'm watching in my living room wasn't remixed for that setting. Fine, I still think it's shit, but I guess that's valid. This doc was never shown in theaters, it was made for home video, so why do they still have all the interview segments at a low volume and every movie clip twice as loud and the jump scares movie clips three times as loud? You mother fuckers mixed this like this on purpose. I had to watch a damn documentary with my finger on the volume button because you intentionally made movie clips much louder to essentially put jump scares in your documentary. There a some pieces of actual documentary quality work here, but overall it feels like a puff piece to get people excited for the new movie, so they gloss any real issues and remind you that they do little jump scares really well (or at least really often). This isn't a retrospective or an in-depth anything; it's a sanitized ad campaign.
