So apparently the movie “Paranormal Activity” got re-released to theaters this weekend. And apparently it’s a pretty big deal. Heh. I would never have guessed it after checking it out on Friday. That’s not to say that it’s a horrible movie by any means, I just found it to be rather bad. Anyway, if you’re considering checking it out then I suggest sticking around. But let’s get on with it, shall we?

Well, there it is. In case you haven’t been paying attention to the latest movie buzz, allow me to give you a bit of a back story on Paranormal. First off, it should be noted that this is one of the highest rated horror movies in recent times, (so right off the bat, you know I’m going against actual critics here). The movie was originally intended to be limited release only, but because of a supposed huge backing from fans via the Internet, the movie ended up going to theaters everywhere this past weekend. The movie itself has been incredibly hyped, almost on the level of The Blair Witch Project. With trailers touting the phrase, “DON’T SEE IT ALONE” and “SO SCARY YOU MIGHT NOT MAKE IT THROUGH IT”, and my personal favorite “HOLY CRAP, I JUST WENT AND SAW THIS MOVIE, AND I ENDED UP PEEING MY PANTS DURING IT. I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE. NO SERIOUSLY, IT REALLY IS THAT SCARY.” Okay, so maybe I made that last one up, but you get the point. Needless to say I went in with pretty high hopes.

What I got instead, was a rather ambitious attempt at trying something new, but ultimately turned into nothing more than an hour and a half, hyped up bore fest. I’m going to try to describe what I mean by saying the movie was “boring”, but the thing is, what’s boring to one person may be exciting to another, so bare with me. Let me start off by examining the more concrete aspects of the movie. Paranormal Activity uses the ever popular “hand-cam” to tell its story. As a result, the cinematography is a bit on the weak side, however, I understand the director’s purpose here. The hand cam is an obvious attempt at trying to make the movie come across as being real (in fact the whole movie is presented this way, there even is a missing credits list at the end of the movie to make it seem more like a documentary), and for the most part it works. This is probably one of the better usages of the hand cam in a movie that I have seen. Paranormal Activity doesn’t suffer from the nauseating “shaky” camera effect that plagued Cloverfield, and overall the hand cam works quite positively for Paranormal.

Now, I know the acting in this movie is supposed to represent “real life”, or people not acting, but I would be a dumb review guy if I didn’t say something about it. Honestly though, the acting in this movie bordered on “acceptable” to “Spanish soap opera channel”.  I can’t really say how I would react to some of the situations that the main characters are forced into, but their reactions at times just seemed a bit unreal. Maybe I’m being a bit too critical here, but it just seemed like a lot of the acting in the movie came down to yelling. Perhaps this is an appropriate response to the situation the characters are facing, it just sort of gets obnoxious at one point. Eh. Maybe the real problem here is the dialogue. Once again, the dialogue can only be described  as a product of trying to make the movie seem as real as possible. A lot of it however, really seems to border on being monotonous and flat out pointless at times. But once again, I understand the motive here; most real life people don’t exactly have the most interesting conversations on an everyday basis, but some of the dialogue in this movie could have easily been edited out, and no one would have been the wiser.

I guess it’s time to discuss my main issue with Paranormal Activity, and that of course would be the scare factor. Going into a movie that pretty much only boasts about being scary left me expecting to be, well, scared. And to tell you the truth, towards the beginning I was quite intrigued by the movie. It started out at a decent enough pace, not too fast, not too slow, and did a really good job of building the tension. However, by about 45 minutes or so in, I was starting to feel bored and anxious. I was actually beginning to notice a trend.

**Minor spoiler warning** The movie itself really only seemed to try to scare you during the night scenes. In fact almost the entire movie can be broken into two segments. The first being the day scenes AKA, the drawn out talking scenes, and the second being the night scenes, or “scary scenes”. Unfortunately, a lot of the movie’s scaring power comes from what I can only really described as “cheap scares”. What I mean by that is the movie gets you to try and focus on a specific thing or character for a moment, and then tries to surprise/ scare you with a loud noise of some sort. The movie tries to make use of this tactic close to a dozen times or so. It finally got to the point where I was just expecting a loud boom or bang, or a door to slightly creak open. These scare tactics really started to just feel repetitive after awhile, and made the movie lose a lot of its edge (at least for me). Paranormal Activity also tries to make use of some psychological scares, but I feel that these were weak at best. Just knowing that the movie was only going to try and scare me at night, made me begin to predict when something was going to happen, and I ended up predicting right about 75% of the time. **End spoilers**

The movie is also quite weak in the plot/ character development department. I won’t divulge any details, but let’s just say both main characters are quite flat. In fact, by the end of the movie I really didn’t care too much for either of them. And because I wasn’t too focused on what happened to the characters, I wasn’t scared/ surprised when something happened to them. As for the plot, let’s just say it’s one of the most simple plots for a movie that I have ever seen. In fact, let me see how few words I can actually describe it in: “A couple try to deal with a demonic spirit that has come over them.” That’s it. That’s literally the premise of the entire movie. And I described it in what? Fourteen words? Seriously? That’s just sort of sad.

In the end, Paranormal Activity’s level of “scariness” will most likely differ from person to person. But the fact still remains that it suffers from some obvious flaws. Pointless dialogue, sub-average acting, scares that get repetitive, and characters I couldn’t give two craps about, really hurt the effectiveness of what Paranormal actually does right.

See it, Rent, or “F-it”: F-it. Honestly, I felt kind of ripped off after I had left the theater. Take my advice and save yourself some money; don’t buy into the hype, or you will more than likely be disappointed.

No tags