I was on my way to watch Moneyball, I swear. Traffic intervened, and I was late. I didn’t really want to watch PA3, but I also didn’t want to admit defeat and head for home. 5 dollar movie night is only once a week. I bought the ticket.

This series is mostly about things not happening. It’s a videographer’s idea of horror, where the primary action is scrubbing through tapes of people sleeping waiting to see something creepy. There’s a sort of cynical math in bad genre pictures – all you have to do to force people to jump is to transition rapidly from quiet to loud, from stasis to action. The lizard brain jumps at loud noises, whether or not the fright is earned. This series is about as cynical as they come. The drunk ladies in my row jumped and screamed about 5 times, all of them at sudden loud noises and flashes of action.

To be fair, it’s a little more ambitious than the two previous entries in the series. In the third act, the director adds a bunch of new elements that I don’t remember hearing about before. If I think too hard about it, I’ll probably realize that the new stuff completely invalidates the established timelines, so I shan’t. If you like to wait around for 10 or so minutes watching nothing and then jump when someone screams, this is your flick. Otherwise, skip all three of these turkeys.

Rent “Attack the Block” from Netflix instead. Scary, funny, suspenseful and even a little meaningful. I’m right about this.