Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin’ on Paramount+, a Sloppy Resurrection of a the Dormant Found-Footage Horror Franchise

First it was V/H/S/94, now it’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (on Paramount+) — all we need is a REC reboot and we’ve got ourselves a full-blown found-footage revival! Next of Kin is the — hold on while I count the notches on my cell wall — seventh Paranormal Activity movie, and the first in six years. Notably, it’s directed by William Eubank (Underwater) and is a reboot of sorts, a departure from the core storyline of the first six films — and frankly, it’s a Paranormal Activity movie in name only.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: NEXT OF KIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Margot (Emily Bader) has watched the security-cam footage over and over and over again: A woman abandoning her child inside a hospital door. Margot was that baby, and now that she’s an adult, she wants to find the woman in the video, her birth mother. We meet Margot in a Denny’s, where her friend Chris (Roland Buck III) is shooting a documentary chronicling her quest to find her blood kin, who are Amish. She meets with Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown), a relative who’s never even been on camera before, because RELIGION, probably. He promises to take her back to the remote farm from whence he came, where there’s no electricity and many cows and all kinds of creepy bullshit going on.

But I’m getting ahead of myself with that last part. Margot and Chris pal up with sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert) and head out to Black Phillip’s Down-Home Occult Country Compound, where they meet Jacob (Tom Nowicki), ye olde patriarch in these here parts. Margot and co. tromp around with their cameras, checking out the cows and pigs, bumping into a sleepwalking kid, hearing noises in the attic, noting the weird lights out in the woods, wondering what those strange animal noises are, capturing an incident with an old woman and her potato peeler (yipes), wondering what’s in that 100-foot-deep hole beneath the floor of the church, etc. It’s all the usual stuff that happens in a society that doesn’t have access to Facebook and $7 artisanal doughnuts.

Nothing is sacred to Margot’s Self-Absorption Film Productions LLC. They don’t ask permission to snoop and poke around, and they’re kind of being dicks to the simple Amish folk who are generously opening their home to strangers and feeding them and exposing them to all manner of suspicious goings-on. Margot learns that her mother was ostracized by her family for getting pregnant, and maybe therefore feels justified in rummaging through drawers and picking the lock on the church door so she can see what the bejeezus is going on in there. Truth is, she’d be better off not finding out.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: With Next of Kin, the Paranormal Activity series gets seriously Midsommar‘d!

Performance Worth Watching: Bader lets rip with a shriek in the film’s final shot that would make any classic scream queen proud.

Memorable Dialogue: Incident that reminds us not to make assumptions about other cultures:

Margot: That’s a beautiful dress. Did you make it?

Amish girl: I bought it at Wal Mart.

Sex and Skin: None: TBNPTDCDTF: Too Busy Not Putting The Damn Camera Down To F—-.

Our Take: The usual found-footage complaint applies: Put down the camera and run, you morons. One must take it with one no matter how much of an inconvenience it may be for one to quick drag it under the bed when someone’s coming or keep it pointed forward when one is running in terror from whatever unholy manifestation is chasing them. The conceit is all and it is god and it must never be defied, no matter how much our suspension of disbelief is derailed. At least the better Paranormal Activity movies had the Sauron all-seeing eye of the oscillating security cam or the cycle through multiple angles in the home security system; Next of Kin is just another shaky-cam horror movie, tossed in the bucket of a well-known franchise for brand-marketing purposes.

Granted, after 70 minutes of tedious setup, Eubank tightens sphincters with a breathless suspenseful sequence that helps compensate for the preceding collection of vaguely stimulating red herrings — red herrings that one might chalk up as “cultural differences” between the Amish and the mainstreamers, if one is feeling generous, a thematic thread that’s a sliver of Midsommar‘s riveting provocations. But the finale, amusing as it may be, is nonsense, with a coda of sorts that seems ripped out of a different movie and stapled on. That 10-to-15-minute suspenseful stretch is frightful, entertaining and good for a few laughs, but not enough to complete the film’s redemptive ascent from the depths of horror dregs.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin has its moments, but not enough of them to warrant a recommendation.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin on Paramount+