The scariest movie ever made.
That tagline used to belong to William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist.”
Not anymore
Now it belongs to a surprise smash hit that has stormed the country titled simply, “Paranormal Activity.”
Made on a budget of 15,000 dollars, the movie is filmed in a documentary style and is the brain-child of director Oren Peli, the plot revolves around a young couple living in a suburban home in San Diego CA, named Katie and Micah. Katie tells Micah that she has been followed since she was a young girl by an entity. Micah, a day-trader, purchases a video camera to attempt to document the entity and record its manifestations.
At first, little to nothing happens. Katie seems to tolerate Micah’s behavior up until the point that things begin to happen. After a self proclaimed psychic visits the home, small things begin to happen at first; objects moving, electronics malfunctioning, and it slowly escalates to larger and more terrifying events, such as doors slamming, horrible slamming footsteps and inhuman roars and growls.
As time progresses, Katie and Micah’s relationship becomes more and more strained as Katie looses sleep and begins to have prolonged sleep walking episodes and her fears about being harmed by the activity rise. Katie repeatedly asks Micah to stop filming as she fears it will make things worse and finally, Micah asks to bring in an Ouija board to communicate with the entity after capturing some disturbing EVP’s. Katie vehemently objects to this and after a heated verbal fighting match, Micah promises to not bring one in.
Despite Katie’s objections and trust, Micah brings a board in and uses it, to get no results. They leave and while they are gone, Micah leaves the camera on to film the board…and the camera catches a very eerie occurence, during which the board itself comes alive and the planchette beings to draw out a pattern, eventually bursting into flame.
Of course, Katie is furious with Micah and a titanic fight occurs, further driving up the stress in the home.
The pattern of activity escalates and finally the film attempts to climax in a fashion that I won’t reveal here for spoilers sake but that is where the problem comes in; the film builds up a good level of suspense and delivers more than its fair share of genuinely scary spook attacks, but fails to live up to the hype in the end by nose diving into cheese…a large vat of ectoplasmic cheese that the Blair Witch Project fell into and never came out.
As an investigator, and an author myself, I attempted to set aside my investigators instincts and just enjoy the story and I did, but again, the ending ruined the whole piece. There is no exposition, no explanation, no reasoning, not even a believable or plausible ending. The film also overlooks key factual points in true demonic assaults. The acting is well done and believable, the special effects are quite good for a budget the size that it had and over all the story is solid but the ending should have packed more power, more of a punch and gave a better resolution.
It is like a roller coaster that climbs and goes up and up and then instead of an adrenaline rush as gravity throws you back in your seat….you get flatlined. The odd thing is, it is not the fault of the actors or the director but rather, strangely, Spielberg who altered the films ending. I honestly feel that if he had not done this, the film would have been much more coherent and packed a far more potent punch than it did.
With that being said, how did I finally score Paranormal Activity?
On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being of course, best, I feel that Paranormal Activity scored a modest 3 out of 10.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 1:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.