Movie Review: Paranormal Activity

THREE THINGS I LIKED:

1. I DON'T KNOW IF I'D CALL THAT ACTING, BUT GREAT RACK ANYWAY — The term "mockumentary" seems more appropriate for comedies, but Paranormal Activity is the latest low-budget creeper that's presented as being amateur home video footage. Part of taking that approach typically involves finding no-name actors to fill the parts, and if the leading man was supposed to be a douchebag, then fine casting was done with Micah Sloat (as himself, of course). It's the San Diego house of Katie Featherston (also as herself) that's the setting for movie and, well, at least I know I'm not alone in admitting what I found most memorable about that performance. Sue me.
2. LESS IS MORE — Director Oren Peli reportedly shot the flick for around $11,000, so Paranormal doesn't resort to excessive gore or special-effects. As a result, Peli manages to effectively squeeze suspense from the simplest signs, be it a door creaking opened and closed while the couple sleeps. Of course, the whole thing begins to feel like a tedious exercise where we're most invested in the scenes in which the couple is asleep while the daylight hours are really just often throwaway filler (a particular Ouija-board sequence earned more laughs from me than shivers).
   
3. DOES THE FOUND-FOOTAGE THING BETTER THAN CLOVERFIELD ... — I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that really counts as a compliment.

THREE THINGS I DIDN'T:

1. ... BUT IT'S STILL MILES AWAY FROM BEING THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT — And that's supposed to be a slam. It's impossible not to make the comparison, of course, because that was precisely the word-of-mouth success story the brains behind Paranormal wanted to mimic. The limited release push was certainly there, but it's all style and no substance—and even the style ain't all that mind-blowing. I had been well aware of the hype surrounding Blair Witch before it hit theaters more than a decade ago and reached a fever pitch that ultimately led to the unfair backlash against it (of course it didn't live up to the expectations for those who were among the last to see it). It's ironic that the same people who criticized that 1999 film for "not being scary" were also the ones unspeakably terrified by Paranormal—which essentially does the exact same thing, only nowhere near as well.
2. IT'S BAD WHEN I'M HOPING FOR A CHARACTER TO DIE, RIGHT? — If we can shove the accompanying hype that seems to influence every viewer's opinion to the side, the reason Blair Witch still remains the best of the "found footage" bunch was the strength of the film's characters and performances. Heather Donahue's infamous runny-nosed video apology ended up being relentlessly lampooned, but most every other low-budget digital effort since has lacked the power of that on-camera confession. Just as I went through Cloverfield without a single character I cared about, related to, or even genuinely wanted to see survive until the final reel, I found myself often hoping for a particular grizzly death for Katie's day-trader boyfriend, Micah. His character could have just as easily been named "plot device" since he's consistently projecting some macho image about being in control even as he can't explain what is occurring in his video footage. I believe Roger Ebert coined a term in his movie glossary for this kind of stuff.
3. MY DISAPPOINTMENT WITH THE ENDING LINGERED WITH ME FAR MORE THAN ANY FEAR — It's a haunted house film. Nothing more, nothing less. There's familiar tricks here that got the girl I was watching the movie with to squeeze my arm a little bit or whatever, but after the movie was over, pretty much nothing about it stayed with me.

25 WORDS OR LESS:

The most memorable part of Paranormal Activity will ultimately be how well the film was marketed, not anything it contained.