Minor plot spoilers

I am not a fan of this series. The stories are too slow to build with long scenes of nothing and then the scare is minimal. This movie is the spoiler for the series as we find out from the subtitle "It runs in the family." We do get an explanation. This is a prequel filmed in high quality DVD using a VHS camera. The acting was better in this one. Lauren Bittner was convincing as Julie. In one scene she puts on a mask and scares the guys. She is so happy she got one over on them, she jumps around with bubbly joy. Also extremely realistic is young Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) who convinces me she has an imaginary friend named Captain Howdy, er ah Toby. Likewise child actor Chloe Csengery did an excellent job as Katie as she goes screaming across the room.

There is a sex scene that is comical. Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) starts out mouthing "wack-a-da, wack-a-da" porno music and as a romantic sort stampedes right to Julie's chest. There are some strange events going on in the house, so it gets wired for VHS tapes. Now as I recall the longest VHS tape setting was 6 hours (some were 8 hours) which means they would of had to been changed out frequently and viewed for paranormal activity with some scenes lasting for a second. With multiple cameras going 24/7...well you get the idea of how tedious and impracticable this becomes. In one scene the stationary VHS camera is looking at the entire girl's bedroom and then the next second it is focusing on Kristi's bed. While they used the amateur camera for a realistic effect, they didn't stay true to it, which made for a better movie. Maybe one day they will discover how real movies are made.

What is not credible is the wife not believing what is going on and refusing to look at the evidence on film. They had to do this so they could keep the constant build up. Dennis filming everything with the camera at grandma's house didn't make much sense. At some point if you are being chased, you stop filming and run. If you are hiding and need to be quiet, you don't keep the camera on. The chase scene is hard to justify filming in all of these types of movies. I felt a little short changed on the ending.

Like the other movies, it starts out slowly, but it doesn't sputter and grind its wheels like they did. This is my favorite of the three.

F-bomb, no nudity, comical foreplay scene. Was that a 1993 Free Willy stuffed whale in this 1988 movie? Now that was really unexplained.

So this movie does scare you enough to have your money worth. But Paranormal Activity 3 has to be the most inaccurate prequel to the storyline of the first two movies. Frankly the trailer was more accurate than the movie itself. From what I decipher from the first two movies, during their childhood, Christie and Katie's parent died when their house was burned down. They did spoke about being raised by their grandmother, but nothing related to it. Well, the script writers changed the script completely and still managed to win over.

By now the fans of the most surprising movie franchise of the decade knows that Christie and Katie had experienced incidents of paranormal nature during their childhood. The story thus takes place during their childhood, staying with their mother Julie and her boyfriend Dennis who coincidently for the sake of us all happens to be a guess what, movie-maker. He shoots marriage videos and Christie and Katie's mother has given him his own editing room inside the house.

Now, we got the cameras and a natural enthusiast, who loves shooting videos. So let just get down to scary business and set the cameras up; but before that, sex tape! Yay! Nope wait, just as it really hots up there is an earthquake and the couple flees the room, leaving us to witness some strange wave of dust falling from the ceiling. After that Dennis concludes immediately that there is something wrong in their new home. Julie plays the role of the usual naysayer, but manages to pull off the biggest fake scare of all during the early sequences. But that ends up being the biggest scare of the movie before the final reel rolls in.

As Dennis sets up multiple cameras in search of the invisible member of the family, young Kristie has him 'Toby' playing with her some tricks during midnight hours. Toby leaves with the young girls in their dark storage room and happens to dislike cameras a lot. His antics begin to rage and somehow become very camera friendly, especially for the camera set on the moving base of a portable fan. To watch him at one position and as the camera switches back to the same point finding no movement of him is more funny trickery than scary. And it all continues till Julie had enough of it when Dennis presents a theory that her family past had members in some witch coven and Toby brings down the kitchen. Frankly both were a stretch for the audience as well as it takes the storyline in a very different direction but in good fun.

Many people expected audience to be exhausted of these camera tricks and stories based on our childhood's bedtime scares. But the paranormal activity movies have become a habit for the blood thirsty horror fans, which are drained of good horror movies recently. Off course, sometime we all hope that Dennis would put down the camera and help his scared kid or wife hanging in thin air; but then we won't have a movie to enjoy. It is good fun and a decent time at the cinema where you watch a horror movie get scared and somehow come out of the theatre smiling.

I was expecting this movie to be better than the second movie considering it has better reviews and it was. Before watching the movie I wasn't sure if I was going to like the story or find it interesting considering it is set 18 years before the events of the first 2 movies which I was skeptical about. The movie was similar to the first movie as in it had likable characters and their story was really interesting. I thought the paranormal activities were good and did make be flinch a bit just like in the first movie. I also thought it was a good concept of having the 2 children experience most of the paranormal activities.