It's been over a handful of years since the last Paranormal Activity movie, with the last supposedly ending the series. That is, until news broke of this reboot, which surprised no one. What is a surprise, however, is the fact that this movie has no real connection to the past films, aside from the name. This will likely divide fans, with some wanting more answers or to see the return of certain characters from the franchise. Meanwhile, others (like myself) just want a different story entirely. We ended up with the latter.

I’m personally not a fan of the PA movies or of found footage in general, but I’ll still give a movie a chance if it looks interesting enough and that’s how I felt going into this one. I knew that the story probably didn’t have much (if anything) to do with the previous installments and I saw that as a good thing.

Writer Christopher Landon returns to script this reboot that focuses on Margot (Emily Bader), a young woman who was adopted as a baby and now just wants to know her blood relatives. After linking up with a family member through a DNA ancestry site, she discovers that her immediate family are Amish and she’s given the opportunity to meet them. Naturally she decides to document the process, so she enlists a friend and another dude to help capture everything.

The rest of the movies goes as you’d expect—secrets and strangeness within the family, weird sounds at night, shadows in the distance, and a lot of snooping around by Margot and her crew. The first hour is essentially just Margot poking around, trying to get answers about her mother and ultimately stumbling onto a bit more than she expected. Along the way she makes a number of dumb decisions like in one instance she discovers a deep dark hole in the ground and her first thought is to go into the damn hole *facepalm*.

The filmmakers attempt to capture the atmosphere and scares that made the franchise so popular, but unfortunately a majority of that falls flat here. In fact, I’d say this is probably one of the least scary of the PA movies. Having said that, it does make up for things in the last 30-minutes, which is when things really amp up, especially as it nears its climax.

As with most found footage movies, there’s a problem with putting down the camera in the most logical of situations, like when they’re running for their lives, but I can look passed that since it’s a common issue with these types of films. However, something that’s a bit hard to overlook are scenes where the camera will magically switch views and go back and forth like there are several cameras and camera operators, which just serves nothing more than to confuse the viewer. There's also a moment when slowmo is used, but it wasn't really utilized enough and served no real purpose in the end.

All negative aside, I still found the movie somewhat entertaining. The first hour is a bit lackluster in terms of scares, but the mystery involving the Amish family and the girl's mother kept me interested, while the last 30 minutes makes up for things in the action department. I know some fans will be disappointed, but I had a semi-entertaining time with this.