The Paranormal Activity movies have been hit and miss with me. The first one scared me so badly that I cried, then I didn't like the second one, then the third one scared me so badly I cried again, the fourth one was definitely a miss for me, I liked the fifth one, and then I liked the sixth one too, and I thought it was a worthy end to the series. Then this one, the seventh movie, came out while I was in jail, so I couldn't watch it even if I HAD been able to get to a theater (our local theater closed doan because: covid) but I've seen every other movie in the series, so I definitely need to see this one. Let's see what I think of it.
This movie features Margot, a young woman who was abandoned by her mother when she was a baby so she has always wondered who her birth family were and what's their story. One day, she is contacted by a young Amish man who is on his Rumspringa (a period of time where Amish teenagers experience the outside world before they choose whether they want to choose the Amish life). The young man took one of those "23 And Me" DNA tests and discovered that he's related to Margot. Excited to learn more about her birth mother, she follows the young man back to his Amish community hoping to learn more about her birth culture and her birth family. She brings a friend or two along with her and a few cameras hoping to document how the Amish live and what their community is like. The longer she stays, however, the stranger the behavior of the people in the community, until she begins to feel like something is horribly wrong. Will Margot learn about her past, or will something terrifying and evil take her very soul?
Let's see, what can I say about this movie? Well, Margot and her friends, Chris and Dale, make some of the stupidest moves I've ever seen in a movie. It's really hard to root for them because they seriously do the dumbest things. it's like those memes you see with street signs pointing toward death and characters in horror movies running towards death, that's these three geniuses. At first they're just disrespectful of the community, filming things they shouldn't and snooping around, and while I get that for purposes of this movie it's ok because these Amish people are really not who they appear to be, if this was just a regular movie and these people were really a simple Amish community, they would have good reason to kick these outsiders to the curb for their lack of respect.
The problem with these found footage type movies is that you always pretty much know what's going to happen at the end. Something bad that causes the deaths of the main characters so their footage can be found in the first place, right? I do give this movie props where lots of found footage type movies have nothing happen FOREVER to build a "slow burn" kind of atmosphere before everything goes apeshit insane at the end, this movie had a lot of stuff happening throughout the whole movie so things never got boring, it does look really stupid for them to stick around after awhile. Once I heard an old lady telling the main Amish guy "you have to do it now" and he agreed, I would be nope'ing the fuck out of there before I found out what "it" was that he had to do. Leaving behind that, plus the ridiculousness of them still filming way after anyone else would have put the camera down, there's a lot more suspension of disbelief than you have even with most found footage flicks.
I have to say something about the plot, because it's very "girl power" heavy in a fucked up way. One of the characters even says women are stronger and that's why they must bear this burden, which is a skewed way of looking at the world (but it's similar to something a character says in the movie "Jug Face," which is another twisted but kinda feminist flick I watched a few years ago for the challenge). This movie just has more everything, more gore than any other Paranormal Activity film, more plot behind what's going on, more jump scares, more characters to die if the evil thing gets loose. I guess more isn't always better, because this sequel left me cold in spite of throwing everything at me like that. I do have to say though that at 99minutes the movie never overstays its welcome. if you're a series completist like me, you know you have to see this one eventually, so you might as well bite the bullet. Who knows, you might even like it.
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