30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 7: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (2012)

The Paranormal Activity series is by now running on fumes, as none of the sequels has been able to replicate the raw terror of the first.  But they've still all been well-made, diverting throwaway shockers, and the new Paranormal Activity 4 is not a disappointment in that vein.  It sticks to the formula, and stakes some new ground to avoid becoming stale.  Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made the third film in the series as well as the clever documentary Catfish, try enough inventive stuff with the premise that it's still fun to watch.

The first film stuck with a first-person single-camera point of view; the second expanded it to multiple security cameras; the third went back to the 1980s and mined some interesting thrills from the limits of VHS technology.  This fourth entry takes us head-on into the 2010s and tells its story through Skype, webcams, smartphones, and any other equipment that helps piece together a modern-day panopticon.

15-year-old Alex (Kathryn Newton) lives with her feuding parents (Alexondra Lee and Stephen Dunham) and little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).  Her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) is ubiquitous in their household, and the two are up at all hours of the night live-chatting.  Then a young mother moves in across the street with her son Robbie (Brady Allen), and there appears to be something wrong with the boy.  He stalks their house, and strikes a strange friendship with Wyatt.  It appears that Robbie may have brought something malevolent with him to the neighborhood.  Scared, Alex and Ben rig every computer in the house to automatically record whatever the webcam sees.

Newton is a likable lead, and Shively is often very funny as her awkward love interest.  Their human story is believable and allows us to identify with them the requisite tension, though the film has a much lighter tone than, say, Sinister.  Joost and Schulman appropriately toy with points of view, delivering plenty of shocks and laughs.  Their biggest discovery of the new film is the use of Xbox Kinect, which, when viewed through a nightvision lens, displays a blanket of infrared beams which captures the players' movements in real time.  It also might capture certain activity which can't be seen in the light.

Other haunting moments don't particularly work, like a bathtub scene which goes pretty much where you expect, or the countless scenes where the ghost apparently gives up on the whole spooky boogeyman game, just picks a character up and drags him or her away.  The ghost could have done this right at the beginning, but then there would be no movie.

Though the film doesn't build to the kind of nerve-ratcheting conclusion that the first did, it still takes us to clever and surprising places as it goes along.  The ending manages to be the best-handled of the sequels so far, striking just the right chord before the inevitable blackout.

** 1/2 out of ****