Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

A woman once abandoned as an orphan leads a documentary film crew into Amish country to record her first encounter with blood relatives, but their welcome disguises a chilling fate ...

Contrived 1st person POV folk horror that barely connects with the concept of the origin story. Sustained on a thin gruel of jump scares, it switches to execution mode with a high degree of implausibility as the characters find themselves in underground territory reminiscent of As Above So Below. And the climax is stretched out in an excessive run time.

Nothing organic about the forced scenario, and light years away from the emotional impact of the first few movies, where we got to eaves-drop on a relationship into which a deadly past steadily crept its way.

In similar style to the later episodes of this franchise, the found footage conceit is betrayed by obvious dramatic edits and touches of music that take the viewer out of the moment. And some heavy CGI - a literal-minded loss of confidence in the power of suggestion. The pacing is OK, but not choppy enough to distract from plot holes.

Four stars for competent acting, and for unusual lighting in scenes involving candles and lamps, plus a few overhead drone shots of the forest. Also a few aspects of the cult's lifestyle are interesting, particularly at the dinner table.

Fmovies: Following a chance encounter with her long lost cousin Amish cousin Samuel Beiler (Henry Ayres-Brown) on rumspringa, Margot (Emily Bader), an adopted college student arranges for a documentary crew consisting of cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III) and Audio Engineer Dale (Dan Lippert) to follow her to the Amish community her mother originally came from as she reconnects with he lost roots. The group are reluctantly welcomed by Beiler family patriarch Jacob Beiler (Tom Nowicki) and try to get information from the hesitant community. But as the group learns more about the Beiler farm and Margot's connection to it, it becomes clear that the Beiler's are hiding a more sinister agenda.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin serves as a reboot of the franchise that Paramount successfully launched in 2009 after having acquired the 2007 film from Oren Peli and through viral marketing created a breakout horror franchise with loads of imitators and capturing the emerging trend of Found Footage Paramount had already tapped into with 2008's Cloverfield. The series became the annual Halloween replacement for the Saw movies where Paramount would release a new Paranormal Activity film fairly regularly until Paranormal Activity 4 saw fans becoming soured on the franchise with follow-ups The Marked Ones and The Ghost Dimension making less and less money with the series ending with a whimper. In 2019 it was announced a new Paranormal Activity film was in the works with writer Christopher Landon returning and Jason Blum and Oren Peli producing once again. The movie is a "soft reboot" that ditches the convoluted and tangled Midwives plotline as well as the primarily suburban settings of the series instead trying to tap into "cult" horror films with The Wicker Man or Midsomer serving as particularly obvious influences. The new direction doesn't really justify continuance of this franchise, but it's unmistakably better than Paranormal Activity 4, The Marked Ones, and The Ghost Dimension.

The movie is directed by William Eubank and this is his first Found Footage movie with his prior works Love, The Signa, and Underwater being conventional narratives. Eubank struggles with the format of Found Footage as there's a number of times where there are "phantom" camera men getting impossible angles as well as auditory cues and stings that call attention to the fact this is a movie down to the fact at one point the audio includes the "ringing ears" effect despite the fact we (the audience) are seeing this from a video camera's perspective and last I checked microphones don't get tinnitus.

I will say the isolated snow covered Beiler farm is a welcome change of pace from the upper middle class suburbia where the other films (barring The Marked Ones) have taken place does add a level of novelty to the series on the surface, but it follows the familiar beats of the "trapped with a cult" formula established by The Wicker Man and the characters aren't interesting or engaging enough to draw you in and distract from the familiar narrative. I will say that Emily Bader is okay as the lead and she does show some solid screen presence, and Tom Nowicki is intimidating and intense as Beiler Family patriarch Jacob, but most of the characters really fall into a "type" and you can guess what'll happen to them fairly quickly. I will say that the third act of the movie does deliver with some solid disturbing violence and the ending doesn't go in the same direction

I'm not a horror fan . Not because these films scare me , it's because they bore me . The last horror film that genuinely scared the living daylights out of me was the first Paranormal Activity which was released in 2007.

Sadly the seventh film in this franchise bares no resemblance to the original whatsoever.

We follow Margot, a young woman who was abandoned by her mother as a baby, who travels to a secluded Amish community with a documentary film crew to seek answers about her mother and extended family.

The first hour of this film is incredibly slow . Nothing of any significance happens . In fact it's that dull it might as well have been called Paranormal Inactivity.

The last half hour is the complete opposite. Manic in fact and and while it's not terrible it's not scary either .

The only comparison to the original film is the use of a hand held camera. A premise that started with The Blair Witch Project and has been used lazily ever since .

The camera thing makes sense here because they are making a documentary but when everything goes tits up in the final third of the film and their lives are on the line , why are they still filming?

This isn't the worst horror film I've ever seen but it brings absolutely nothing new to the table .

It's like I've seen it all before .

It's a run of the mill horror film that just so happens to have Paranormal Activity put in the title . That's about it .

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin fmovies. 4/10 - not as though there weren't some bright spots in the film (I mean if we're being honest, nothing that comes from Christopher Landon can be bad bad), but the whole Amish/cult thing didn't work for me (and reminded me of the 2020 iteration of Wrong Turn which I felt had the same problem)

I'll start by saying that I prefer to see a paranormal activity movie at the movie theatre vs. At home. I always enjoyed the experience better there.

Next of Kin shows how much this genre has change snice the 1st movie. The original just felt raw and amateurish, which did add to the environment of the film. On the other side, we live in a world where far more people know how to make a movie because technology makes it much easier it is now. This also adds to this movie's environment. The original film feels like a documentary while this latest film feels like a narrative pretending to be a documentary film. Both films are the latter and in 2021 next of kin easily gets away with adding a little more polish than what would have been acceptable for the original.

Is this an extension of the film franchise? Meaning is this a story connected to the original movie or an original story? I feel like it could be the former but I only see all these movies once so I could not say. Either way, it thought the story was pretty good and had a lot of elements that are similar to the overall story arch of the Paranormal activity franchise. I liked that. The possible trivial connections this story may have to the original makes up for it being exclusive to the small screen.

I got the impression that Next of kin is not only furthering the story of Paranormal activity but also furthering the found footage genre it popularized. A lot of the movie is doing the old school format of Paranormal activity (like the recording of the dates). A lot of it I feel I've seen in other found footage movies, particularly, I see them paying homage to the film that started it all: the Blair Witch Project, simply in style and substance.

Overall, this one is not nearly as scary as the other ones. Not just because watching a movie like this at home lessons that, but the movie decides on a quicker pace that's going for thrills over fright.

'Paranormal Activity' films used to be the staple of every Halloween. They were remarkably consistent right up until the very unfortunate 'Ghost Dimension' which killed the series. Now, years later, we have another entry in the 'Paranormal Activity' series. The only problem is that it is a part of the series in name only. It has no connection to the previous films and it has nothing that demands it be a 'Paranormal Activity' movie. It could be any old found footage film - and not a very good one at that.

The original series was so good because it was set in an ordinary looking house like yours or mine. And the thought of your partner spending hours through the night standing over you and staring was simply terrifying. A film set on an Amish farm isn't scary in any way, because who of us is ever going to go to one?

A couple of things I did like. They were able to recreate the feel of the series in the first half of the film. It was actually building up quite nicely for a while there until it decided to go well off the rails at the end. The other thing I liked were the main three characters. They were very likeable and people I could get onside with.

I feel like I'm mentioning it a lot in films lately, but it needs to be remembered that less is more. This film goes so hard and in your face that it can't possible be scary. What we don't see is always scarier than what we do. This film completely forgets that at the end.

I so desperately wanted to like this movie, with the hope that it would reignite a series that I love. This wasn't the storyline to do it with though. This feels like a random found footage film that needed a selling point, and so chucked 'Paranormal Activity' in front of its title. Very disappointing. 5/10.