Beetle refuses to be spooked by Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity... Take away the para and the title would fit the film

I'm going to let rip, for the very first time in the history of this site, a HUGE spoiler. I've generously left a gap between this paragraph and the next so that those who would wish to know nothing about this film will not be angered. That is actually the best way to walk into this little film, knowing absolutely nothing about the film, and if you have seen the trailers...well, you know more than you think you do...trust me.













The reason why the title is misleading is because the entity antagonizing the couple in the film is not a ghost... It's a demon. Hence the title PARAnormal activity doesn't really fit the film, because Demons aren't paranormal.

In Paranormal Activity we follow a young couple, Micah and Katie, as they deal with an increasingly aggressive demon that has been stalking Katie since childhood.

Activity has absolutely NO BEGINNING...instead making the interesting choice of thrusting the audience directly into the middle of the story, with Micah bringing the videocamera home and doing a quick test run of it. It is with this camera that Micah, against the pleas of his girlfriend and a psychic, will attempt to record footage of the entity in action. He is warned several times that by using the camera he will only be teasing the spirit, thus making things worse. Micah, being the cocky show-off that he is, blows off the warnings and begins to document the activity in the house. Of course, it doesn't take long for things to get much much worse. Soon, angered by the prescence of the camera the demon shifts its focus from Katie to Micah.

Paranormal Activity draws more than inspiration from the Blair Witch Project, a much better executed and interesting film despite it's shakey cam.

Activity takes an oft-repeated idea and tries, unsuccessfully, to breathe life into it. The 2 main characters are unlikeable and uninteresting. Micah is the typical alpha-male boyfriend that repeadeatly re-assures Katie that, despite evidence to the contrary, he's got everything under-control. Katie, while alot smarter than Micah, is just plain boring to watch. Another problem with the film is that it just isn't believable, it all felt extremely fake. I wish I could say what they could have done to make it more "Real" but I don't know. I have a feeling that it may have to do with the atmosphere they created. The house this couple inhabits just does not scream SCARY to me. The last 20 minutes or so of the film is where it finally does start to get scary, unfortunately After said 20 minutes it has a typical hollywood anti-climactic ending.

Suffering from inconsistant scares, and a too-short running time (for the love of god, all you needed to do was slap an extra 20 minutes onto the last 20 and keep the scares coming!!) Paranormal Activity unfortunately falls flat. The "Scares" aren't all that scary (OH NO, a moving door!!) until the final 20 minutes, and unfortunately by then it's too late because the end is near.

I'm catergorizing this film into the HAD GREAT POTENTIAL category along with Jennifer's Body. This film could have been a scary-as-hell-shit-your-pants-run-out-of-the-theatre-crying film, but the filmmakers didn't follow up on any of the great scares they had the opportunity to generate during the film. I just can't bring myself to reccommend this film to anyone. Paranormal Activity, while interesting at the best of times, is a fairly Normal outing at your local theatre...unfortunatly.

2.5/5