PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Yesterday I went to see the horror hit of the fall PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, I wanted to see all the hype, all the scariness that people are hollering about. The film was number #1 and made over the weekend $67 million and SAW 6 came in number #2. I paid the early matinee price $8.75 (the early matinee special) at my local AMC movie theater. I sat in the middle of the auditorium, a few people in the audience. So, what do I have to say about PARANORMAL ACTIVITY? Is all right, whatever…

The doom twenty-something year old couple Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) (The actors used their real first names to give it that non-fiction true story) are living in a nice two floor home. They hear noises, footsteps, ghostly sounds and all the bumps that go off at night.  Micah buys a nice prosumer camera to videotape all the paranormal bumps in the night.  Katie invites a psychic (Mark Fredrichs) to their house, she tells him that since she was eight years old, she feels something has been following her and she always heard things that go bump in the night.  The psychic feels there is something in the house, but Micah doesn’t believe in the Psychic, he thinks he is a fruit.

 
For three weeks Micah places his prosumer camera in the middle of their bedroom for surveillance to capture any happenings.  In the middle of the night the camera captures the door closing, noises, a shadow, Katie in a state of somnambulism staring at her sleeping boyfriend for two hours.  Micah shows all the captured dailies to Katie to prove there is something really wrong in the house. Katie starts to get a little weird, Micah is trying to help her with video camera in hand to capture everything she is going through… In the middle of the night, a spirit comes in, pulls the sheet off Katie, and drags her out of the room as she screams glory mercy. Micah runs after her to help her.  Katie is freaking out, but they continue to stay at the house, in which I don’t understand why this couple stayed at this house, when you hear things that go bump in the night, get up and get the fuck out.

SPOILER ALERT: Katie in another state of somnambulism, stands by Micah's side of the bed, stares at him for a while, she leaves the room slowly, she goes downstairs, we hear some creepy hard footsteps, a little while later, we hear Katie scream at the top of her lungs, suddenly waking up Micah.  Micah jumps out of bed and runs downstairs. They both start to scream. Then a sudden pause.  Micah gets thrown across the room, knocking down the video camera.  We see Katie in the middle of the room, blood all over her shirt.  Katie walks up to the dead Micah on the floor.  She kneels besides him, smells him and she looks at the camera (at us the audience). Her face turns into a quick ghostly demon. The End.  That’s it. Credits of the couple’s whereabouts, then the end.

 Katie and Micah deliver a fine tune performance, especially Katie Featherston. Filmmaker Oren Peli did a cute job with the whole scare tactics, lets see if his next film live up to the hype, like the Blair Witch Project Filmmakers they were famous for a year and so, then they disappeared making crap, and where are they now?

I really didn’t care much for PARANORMAL ACTIVITY - the whole video camera point of view scariness and jolts is so overrated, is been done in hundreds of horror films - THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, .REC, QUARANTINE (.REC remake), DIARY OF THE DEAD, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, OPEN WATER and the list could go on. I do admit Paranormal Activity is ten times better than The Blair Witch Project with more suspense, more scares and spooky wild noises. But this type of film has been done already, in different million ways, with the same storylines, demon possession taking over the wife and killing her husband, or vice versa, is been done over and over and over again. Did I care for the film? Nope. What is all the hype about? TWO STARS from EYEPUS. Wait till it comes out on DVD (with its alternative endings) rent it, or buy it when it comes to the five dollar bins at Walmart.

TWO STARS - NOT A CLASSIC