I Review Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity is a movie about paranormal activity.  It is not a documentary, as the advertisements would have you believe.  It is entirely fictitious.  It had an extremely low budget, the lowest budget for a feature film since The Blair Witch Project.

This is the only laudable fact about the entire movie.  Everything else is total shit.

Paranormal Activity (henceforth PA) is supposed to scare you.  It is supposed to startle you, and frighten you, and make you afraid to go to sleep at night.  That is the purpose of this movie.  And it just utterly fails.

Let's put it this way.  There was one scene, one scene, in Law Abiding Citizen which startled me more than the entirety of PA.  I laughed through most of PA.  Fucking Kohl's is more unsettling than this film.  Why is it so not scary?

Well, for one, it's totally overdone.  They're just trying too hard.  This movie is about as subtle as its title.  At the beginning, they thank the two main characters and the police department of the film's setting, as if the events really happened.  At the very end, it's an extremely cheesy, "THE MONSTER IS STILL ON THE LOOSE" thing.  There are no little clues to tell you about anything; it's just a totally blunt presentation of absolutely everything.  Watching it was like watching a child describe very obvious facts in extreme detail.

There's no suspense, either.  You know exactly when everything is going to happen.  How?  Because there's a bass tone every time anything is about to happen.  Every.  Time.  You hear the bass tone, and you know something weird is going to happen.  Why would they do that?  It takes away everything that makes scary movies scary, that is, not knowing when something is going to happen.

A further thing which detracts from the suspense is the documentary-like presentation.  Almost all of the titular paranormal activity occurs at night, and they speed up the sections of the night that have nothing going on.  You can just watch the time stamp, and, when it stops, look up and wait for the demon to do its business.  The bass tone and the time stamp make this movie as predictable as frickin' gravity.

As for why I laughed through the whole thing:  The characters are just completely unlikable.  There're two main characters, the male lead and the female lead.  The male lead is an arrogant douchebag, and the female lead is a helpless whiner.  That's the extent of their personalities.  So, I laughed because I not only didn't sympathize with them, but also wanted bad things to happen to them.  And bad things did happen to them, in extremely predictable, formulaic ways.

There was only one point in the whole film that I jumped.  At the very, very end.  And it wasn't even a scared jump, it was just a surprised jump.  I'm not saying this to sound macho.  I get scared at (good) scary movies.  The fact just is that this jump was not a scared jump.  And, if you pay attention to the commercials, they show the scene which provoked this jump.

Yes.  This movie is so predictable that they just showed you the ending in the promotional material.

I've avoided spoiling the plot as much as I can, what little of it exists.  I don't really know why, though.  The creators obviously don't care.

This is a terrible, terrible movie.  The worst I've ever seen in the horror/suspense genre.  I wish I could get my money and time back.

Zero points out of a trillion.*

---

* Yeah, three orders of magnitude worse than Secret Girlfriend.