Paranormal Activity (Movie Review)

Movie Review
Paranormal Activity
2007
Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat
Directed by: Oren Peli

It seems that every couple of years we get a small movie that gets a lot of attention and is hyped to the moon. In 2009 (the year it opened in wide release), we were given Paranormal Activity which was shot on a budget that is a fraction of a fraction of most Hollywood blockbusters. Super small-budget movies can be good (like Kevin Smith’s Clerks) but most of the time they feel amateurish. Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity feels like an amateur movie you could find on Youtube. Sure, it’s got a story but it’s pretty lame. The actors aren’t that great either and they have the personalities of dehydrated Twinkies. But, the worst part is that for a horror film, it’s not that scary. In fact, the scariest part is thinking about how much time I spent watching this film.

Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Sloat) are a young couple settling into their first house. However, Katie reveals to Micah that a mysterious presence is in the house and that she’s been stalked by this supernatural being since she was young. While Micah is sceptical, he decides to videotape every moment of the day in the house to see if they can find evidence of the spirit on film. Not soon after they begin their videotaping experiment, they start to see mysterious things pop-up on film like seeing doors shut violently for no reason and weird sounds coming empty areas of the house. Katie also seems to be acting stranger by the day as the stress of the being is preventing her from getting much sleep and she begins acting bizarre, as well. Each passing day gets worse and worse and they begin to seriously worry about their lives.

As long as the core content of a movie is good, then no matter what the budget of the film is, it will be able to still stand out. Paranormal Activity doesn’t really have much substance. The story is kind of interesting but within five minutes, it doesn’t become a question of how will it end but how messed up will the ending be. It’s easy to see that the makers of the movie were painting themselves into a corner that they couldn’t get out of unless they came up with an even more ridiculous ending.

The acting is pretty bad. I mean, considering the budget, no one should be expecting Oscar-calibre performances but these performances were pretty bad. We’re not talking B-movie produced for the straight-to-video market bad but pretty gruesome for a major release. It’s almost as if the two main actors think that acting is a matter of raising or quieting their voices. Their emotions feel fake. Another problem is that these two people are very unlikable. It gets to a point where you want this unfriendly ghost to finish them off so that way the movie will end. They’re whiny and annoying. The people in trouble are supposed to be likable. Otherwise, you don’t care if something bad happens to them.

But the worst part of the movie is that it isn’t scary. The movie mostly employs a technique where nothing happens for minutes at a time and then something happens for a couple of seconds; like a door slamming shut in the middle of the night. It’s startling but in the way you turn on your TV and don’t expect the volume to be super loud. It might make you jump because you’re spending several minutes watching nothing happen on screen and then something spontaneous happens. Even the final scenes are not that scary; they’re just weird.

Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity is a movie that needed to go back to the drawing board. There’s elements of an interesting plot hidden in there, but nothing works. Horror films need to be scary and this one is weak. Calling this movie scary is like saying mustard is spicy. The actors they got almost feels as if they hired them off the street (which isn’t far from the truth). Paranormal Activity could have been a good film had the entire story been rewritten, the characters recast, and some more thought was into making the film creepy rather than trying to scare people with loud noises. I could do that by popping balloons.

☆