Sometimes a person just doesn’t get along. In films, it can be the other characters that don’t mesh, or sometimes it’s the audience themselves who just can’t stand a single idiot character that won’t go away. I believe the term is “Jar-Jaring” or, if you’re referring to television, “pulling a Lori.” Last year I gave you a pretty okay list of characters that achieved excellent redemptions for their wrongdoings. Today I want to explore those who did not. These are the asshole characters that tried and failed, or simply didn’t try at all. Hey spoilers!

Narrative gimmicks don’t always draw me in, but when I’m in the middle of watching a bunch of unremarkable festival films and something as original as Hank and Asha comes along, I’m easily seduced. That makes it sound undeserving, though, which isn’t the truth. The film is dominated by an unconventional structure that should in theory quickly become tedious for the viewer and a burden on the story, yet it carries on with great charm and a romantic spirit that’s rarely found at the movies today. It begins with a video message from Asha (Mahira Kakkar), an Indian studying film in Prague, sent to Hank (Andrew Pastides), a New York-based filmmaker whose documentary just screened at a festival she attended. He couldn’t make it, so Asha has decided to reach out for a one-on-one Q&A (presumably via email though we never get the specifics on what platform or network they use to send messages). He replies with a video of his own, and soon they’re digital-age pen pals, sharing everything from personal confessions to whimsical virtual tours of their respective cities in montage form.

Halloween is nearly upon us and for once I’m not railing against the studio system for a lack of horror in theaters. It seems five years of complaining has finally gotten through to them. Just kidding, they don’t listen to me. But October has been a pretty good year for horror in terms of movies actually being in theaters. In wide release this month we’ll have Sinister, Paranormal Activity 4, and Silent Hill: Revelation. Throw in a couple of limited release titles and this feels like at least quadruple the amount of horror films we normally get. And even if you longed for more horror, you’d only have to turn on the TV. Switch the set on, and it’s more horrific than ever! The Walking Dead! American Horror Story: Asylum! AMC’s programming of monster movies! Well heck, what possibly could I be mad at with this quantity? Why, quality, of course.

We are now four installments into the Paranormal Activity series — five if you include the first spin-off, Tokyo Night — and the movies are starting to feel like episodes in a long-running TV show rather than a succession of film sequels with independently existing story arcs. As Adam noted in his review of Paranormal Activity 4, it’s like watching Lost, particularly in the later years when answers to mysteries were not only kept from fans but those mysteries were joined by new questions. With the latest film appearing to have the lowest reviews, CinemaScore and box office gross since the series began, will fans keep following the Paranormal Activity films until they get all the explanations they seek? Just as with a show that decreases in quality and increases in frustration (that’s not to necessarily mean Lost), I will likely keep with it out of curiosity. I can be obsessive and exhaustive in my curiosity at times, and if anything, Paranormal Activity 4 has actually piqued my interest more than the other films have, even if it’s just by introducing new characters and taking a leap forward in time, the latter leaving a large gap in our understanding of what’s going on. And I’m not alone. You can find people discussing and offering theories all over the web, including from people who admit the new movie is the worst of the bunch. To them, this is just a weak episode, something all TV shows have now and again and

Editor’s note: With Paranormal Activity 4 now officially released in theaters, here is a re-run of our Fantastic Fest review, originally published on September 27, 2012. Although the FF version was a work-in-progress, as far as we can tell the final cut is mostly the same save for a slight reordering of some scenes near the end. Another set of cameras and another hopeless family that can’t help themselves. They can’t rid themselves of a demonic presence that is purposefully in their home for a reason, nor can they keep from being compelled to record everything that happens. For a franchise that utilizes the “found footage” form of filmmaking, it still isn’t quite clear yet who has found all of this footage to show us, or why they’ve chosen to sift through two decades’ worth of recordings and cleanly edit it all together and make movies out of them. I gather I’m reading too much into this, but by this point I think I’m due an explanation. Paranormal Activity 4 takes place chronologically following the disappearance of Katie (Katie Featherston) and her nephew Hunter (Brady Allen) at the end of  Paranormal Activity 2, which actually took place before Paranormal Activity, except for the final five minutes, which take place after the events of Paranormal Activity, which started this whole train until we saw Paranormal Activity 3, which explained the origins of the hauntings and the commentary on home video paranormal voyeurism. Part 4 takes place five years after the events of

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Paranormal Activity movies have been massive successes and helped propel the found footage genre into the mainstream. Whether or not you agree this is a good thing, you’re gonna have to brace yourself for a brand new movie of long home video camera shots when Paranormal Activity 4 comes out this week. In preparation for the new film, why not revisit the previous three movies on your choice of platform. To make things go a little more smoothly so you don’t feel the effects of repetition and bad horror movie characters, enjoy this drinking game with any of the films from the series..

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; the only thing we haunt is casino breakfast buffets. You’ve arrived at the most unsettling of bad movie columns on the perfidious den of wickedness known as the interwebs. Every week we present for your viewing displeasure a particularly ghastly piece of cinematic schlock unearthed from the vaults of unspeakable horror (alias the Rubbermaid trash can full of VHS in the garage). As we force your unsuspecting eyes to behold the nightmarish horrors of the movie’s shortcomings, we cackle with sinister delight. We go so far as to then reveal our morbid appreciation for said filmic abomination. To top off the torture, we will force a fiendishly tasty snack food, themed to the film, down your cowering gullets. This boys and ghouls, is Junkfood Horror. October is the month that everyone watches horror movies. From the hardcore weirdos to the sissiest of sissy babies, for at least a few weeks, we all enjoy a good scare. As we sit on the front porch of Junkfood Labs, devouring bag after bag of “fun”-sized Snickers because the trick-or-treaters apparently won’t be showing up for several hours, and several days, it occurred to us that there is really no getting away from the horror genre. When November 1st arrives, you can lock away all your copies of The Exoricist and Amityville and Maid in Manhattan, but the irrepressible evil there contained will not relent. “Oh wait,” you say interrupting my column with your smelly internal monologue, “I can

Paranormal Activity 4 hits theaters October 19th, and if you’re already planning on going, then you are really, really dedicated to this franchise. Seriously. You’re sticking it out, and there’s something probably commendable about that. At any rate, you’ll be rewarded with even more Paranormal Activity for going to see the fourth Paranormal Activity. According to Bloody Disgusting, Paramount is planning to toss a post-credits tease for the forthcoming “Latino-themed” spin-off onto the prints. From writer/director Christopher Landon, the new movie will feature a Latino cast and involve Catholicism, but it will be in English (meaning that the “latino-themed” Actividad Paranormal (my title) will later have to be clumsily dubbed into Spanish. Irony abounds) and isn’t the first foreign-focused spin-off for the franchise. In 2010, they released Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night. There may be sequels forever and ever, but this move is especially laudable for how transparently cash-grabby it is. Hopefully, Actividad Paranormal 2: La Llorona’s Revenge will be ready by the time Paranormal Activity 5 and Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night 2: Tokyo Afternoon both hit screens.  

While last year’s Paranormal Activity 3 injected the hit franchise with some much-needed style and skill, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman‘s first big-time feature was chided for releasing some trailer that, how do we say, featured almost nothing but footage that wasn’t in the film film? No matter really, as the final result was the best in the series and still pulled off more than a few inventive scares (come on, you know that kitchen gag was aces), but such a track record certainly gives us pause when it comes to any new video footage from Joost and Schulman’s upcoming Paranormal Activity 4. This new teaser is packed with some very standard scares – faces in the dark, banging doors, flashing lights – and while that may be a bit boring and expected, it does mean that we most likely aren’t getting teased with very specific footage we won’t see in the final product. After all, jump scares are a dime a dozen. Check out the latest teaser trailer for Paranormal Activity 4 after the break.

It’s one thing when a series is based around several generations who are actively seeking adventure – treasure hunting and Nazi-punching and all that. That’s not what we’re here to discuss. Don’t expect to see any Corleones on this list, either. This is about those hapless, generally well-functioning families in films who for one reason or another keep falling into bad times. These are the families that trouble follows. These are the truly unlucky ones.

Who wouldn’t love to have their own personal soundtrack playing wherever they went? An epic theme song that announced your arrival when you walked into a room or a electric guitar riff whenever you might need an extra rush of adrenaline – these touches would make every move you made seem movie worthy. And sure, you can throw in your iPod ear buds as you walk around town or crank up your car stereo as you hit the gas to get a similar effect, but without having someone follow you around with a boom box, having a personal soundtrack is not very likely because (unfortunately) that is not how things work in real life. In normal, everyday life music isn’t always playing, underscoring our more emotional moments and highlighting the intense ones. With the emergence of found footage films bringing a new style of filmmaking to the industry (with mixed results and reactions), the idea that these films are made up of footage anyone could capture if they were to pick up a camera and hit record leaves these films (as is the case in life) without much music. Real life is full of ambient noises, awkward pauses and people accidentally talking over one another so a film capturing these moments would break that unedited feeling if it had perfectly scored music fleshing out scenes because that is simply not true to reality.

Since no new ABC supernatural or sci-fi drama can stand on its own merits, The River has been touted as the latest attempt to replicate the sort of success and intrigue that the network had with Lost—as you may remember, 2009’s Flash Forward and V were both met with the same comparison upon their debuts. The Steven Spielberg-produced series is an adventure-paranormal-horror-thriller hybrid and because one of its creators is Paranormal Activity writer-director Oren Peli, it’s no surprise that the story, set in the spooky, uncharted regions of the Amazon, is presented to us as found footage. “Found footage,” you exclaim, possibly scrunching your face up in disgust. “Does this Peli character realize that there are other ways to frame a story?” Apparently he doesn’t. But that’s okay, because the concept works here, at least in the short term.

Just days after Paramount announced that they’re (shockingly!) going ahead with a fourth installment in their runaway scare-em-up success Paranormal Activity franchise comes word that Paranormal Activity 3 co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman are back on board to direct. The pair took on PA3 after the success of their “documentary” Catfish, and while that film has certainly had its own share of speculation as to its veracity, the pair’s ability to present fiction as fact (or vice versa) helped make the third Paranormal Activity the best (and most inventive) yet. The fourth film is already slated to hit theaters on October 19, 2012, continuing the franchise’s established tradition of a pre-Halloween opening (the first film was the only one to not occupy a similar release date), effectively stealing the thunder of the Saw franchise now and forever. Our pals over at /Film took this opportunity to speculate about what the next Paranormal Activity would entail, positing that “the story of Paranormal Activity 4 will likely go one of two ways. Either it can go back in the past and show why Katie and Kristi’s grandmother got all wacky or it can jump ahead (something I felt the third film was lacking) and explain what is going on with the now possessed Katie and her nephew, who she’s kidnapped from her dead sister.” Those ideas just got my gears turning for what I want to see in the next installment.

Recently, Paramount sent around one of those pat-yourself-on-the-back sorts of press releases announcing that they made more money worldwide than any other studio last year. Of course, not one to dwell too long in the past, they also managed to slip in a little paragraph bragging about how good their upcoming 2012 looks as well: “In 2012, Paramount’s release slate highlights include World War Z, a zombie thriller starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the next installment in the global franchise starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Channing Tatum, a new chapter in the Paranormal Activity franchise, and The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen and directed by Larry Charles, the team behind Borat.” The interesting part of this paragraph is that, in addition to mentioning a bunch of high profile projects that we already knew about, the studio is also claiming that they have another Paranormal Activity movie in the works, which is news. All of these other movies are in various stages of post-production, but Paranormal Activity 4 is naught but a glimmer in some profit-minded executive’s eye.

Since we all have a million dollars, our minds are almost always tuned to the day dream of what kind of movie we’d make with all that loose cash just lying around (since banks do nothing but lose things). Would it be a romantic horror film? Would it be a silent action film? Would we blow of all of it on lighting and forget the other elements of production design? Probably. Fortunately, we’ve all had a few filmmakers tread before us in using their million bucks with efficiency and artistry. In a world where Michael Bay needs 200 suitcases full of $1m, these directors made it happen with only one of those suitcases (or no suitcases at all), and they created a lasting legacy despite their lack of foldin’ money. If they can do it, why not us? Here are 8 great films made for under a million dollars that we can all learn from. (And if you enter our contest sponsored by Doritos, you might actually win that $1m you need for all those lights.)

I could probably make this review incredibly brief and make everyone happy. If you liked the first two films you’re likely to like the the third.

I wrote that review while waiting in the line for the men’s room.

Like Paranormal Activity 2, Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel to its predecessor. It takes place in the month of September of 1988 when the two sisters of the first two films were little girls and the referenced beginning of their experiences with the invisible, kitchen furniture-hating demonic figure began. Seriously, this demon really hates kitchens. I think he hates everything but camcorders.

Remember the salad days, when commercials tried to tell us that Paranormal Activity was the scariest movie ever made? And remember when you finally saw the film, and it had one jump-scare, and that was it? Just me? Well, we can talk about that later. It was a bit of a no-brainer that Paranormal Activity would spawn a franchise – after famously being made on the cheap, and gathering serious word-0f-mouth buzz by way of the Internet (a sort of modern day The Blair Witch Project approach to viral techniques of marketing, paired with a sense of the secretive), Paramount would have been stupid to let the “found footage” smash hit go without pushing out a few more sequels. There was Paranormal Activity 2, which served as the chocolate wafers to the cookie cream that is the Oreo that is the Paranormal Activity franchise. That’s a yummy way of saying that the events of the first film fit into the middle of the second film, making it both a prequel and sequel. Clever! Now we get a real prequel, one that goes way back to the childhood of Katie and Kristi, the sisters at the center of the mystery. Check out the second trailer for Paranormal Activity 3 after the break, which expands on the first glimpses we got of the film from its earlier teaser, glimpses that show us that young Katie and Kristi were, well, pretty damn hard to handle.

You did it, godammit. They just invited us to dinner. Synopsis A small band of American filmmakers departs for the Amazon to document the lives of warring cannibal tribes. Two months after they’ve vanished into the so-called Green Inferno, a rescue team led by anthropologist Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) discovers the documentary crew died at the hands of the Yanomamo tribe. Monroe retrieves the crew’s footage and brings it back to New York. The found footage depicts an orgy of shocking sadism – perpetrated by both the cannibals and the “civilized” Americans.

After invisibly slamming doors against the faces of the movie-going public with a modern day ghost story, director Oren Peli is getting a bit more traditional with his next project. He’ll be adapting “The System of of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether,” which either means he’s making a film version of an Edgar Allen Poe short story or of a funky single from The Alan Parsons Project. Apparently it’s the former (since we’ve already ruled out credit going to the Edgar Alan Poe-sons Project), and apparently they’re changing the name (since that whole thing won’t fit on a title card) to simply Eliza Graves. The original story is a black comedic take on the lunatics taking over the loony bin, and the synopsis for the film seems to at least follow the bread crumbs home there. According to Variety, the plot focuses on a recent medical school graduate who begins working at an insane asylum without knowing that it’s been taken over by the inmates. The goosebumps are already forming. Specifically because Mel Gibson is executively producing.

Sequels are rough waters to navigate. Ideally they need to accomplish two things: enhance, expand, and support the world of the original and still stand on its own as an individual film. If you’ve ever seen a sequel that does too much of the former without any attempt at the latter, you get a pandering sequel that feels completely unnecessary; a la The Ring 2. If the movie missteps in the opposite direction, the sequel will seem so severed from the original and you will be left wondering why it bears the same name; the woe bore by the likes of 30 Days of Night: Dark Days. Whether you loved, loathed, or were indifferent towards the first Paranormal Activity, it’s hard to deny that its follow-up succeeds in both criteria.