Tuesday, November 1, 2011

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 77: Paranormal Activity 2



I feel that I should explain my history with this movie. The first Paranormal Activity scared the shit out of me. I mean I turned on every light in the house and sat up all night crying and singing hymns, afraid to close my eyes. THAT kind of scared. I know that a lot of people think these movies are stupid, and I understand where that is coming from. Take this sequel. A great majority of this movie really does feel like you're watching some stranger's home movies. The original had a better balance of rising and falling action, I think. Scary things would happen, but even when nothing scary was happening, I got enough information about what the characters were going through that I cared about what was happening to them.

In this movie, I seriously timed 25 minutes of nothing happening before anything actually happened. I know the main characters were supposed to have returned home to find their house ransacked and we're supposed to think some ghostly force did it (though they don't suspect that at first) but that doesn't count as scary for me, because we didn't actually SEE anything ghostly happen, just the aftermath. BORING. And the rest of the video falls flat. The dad comes out to the pool to find the pool cleaner has somehow made it out onto the patio every morning, but that's not very scary, and the geniuses still don't suspect anything at first, because they're dipshits.

Once scary things do start happening, though, I think this movie picks up and holds its own and manages to be creepy as well as having a mean-spirited streak that I enjoyed with a twist at the end. I definitely dug it, though it didn't scare me as much pound for pound as the original movie did. Still a very spooky movie to kick off my Halloween night.

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