Paranormal Activity has been said to be one of the most epic horror films of all time. It reached over one million demands on its website and is the subject to some massive hype. That hype failed me as I was found to be let down.
The film is supposed to focus on a true story that happened in 2005. There is something freaky going on th house of Katie and Mikah. This freakyness stops them sleeping at night and whatnot. So the film opens with Mikah using one them big cameras. This gives us that feel that it might be similar to The Blair Witch Project. Mikah is filming around the house, filming Katie and mainly just about everything in the house. The film is ridiculed with all of these jump cuts from like sitting on the couch to in the kitchen. This can get a bit annoying and disturbs the flow of the film. We then have the sections of nighttime episodes. These slowly build up suspense (yes it does not work and is of poor quality) with windy movement, shadows across the doors, and making loud noises and slamming doors. When we come to the ending finally, I wanted to vomit at how lame it was and how it did no justification to the film.
The jerky camera is something I can cope with; it does get a bit annoying when you add the shaky dialogue and poor quality of suspense. And the jump cut thing just makes things worse. Watching these, I could hardly see the paranormal shadow and had to rely on the shabby dialogue to help me figure out what is going on. But it is useless and is just frustrating. I could not focus on anything, hence the boredom.
There is hardly any music throughout There is sound effects which are pretty useless and don’t really scare anyone. The spooky music that Mikah plays through his computer is something interesting but feels like it was chucked in. Honestly, if you want to watch something scary that has a decent soundtrack to it, I recommend Poltergeist. That one has nice and spooky background music.
Overall, I don’t see how there has been so much hype about this movie. It was a massive let down for me. I felt like I had just wasted my time watching something that is completely overrated. I also feel sorry for those millions of humans that had to waste 97 minutes of their life watching this crap. I have one final word and that is rubbish.
0/5 rubber chickens.
The opinions reflected in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of LW and/or its staff members.
Finally another person actually giving a negative review. I’ll expect one for Fourth Kind and 2012 as well.
Yikes, 0/5! I loved the movie. It was funny and good for a silly scare. It plays on the uneasiness many people have when hearing random, unexplained noises and stuff in their homes. I definitely fell for (most of) it. That being said, the number of plot holes and nonsensical decisions were ridiculous. The acting at times was really bad, but I attribute that to inexperience and ad libbing.
As for the music, there really shouldn’t be music since this is filmed by the couple. Why would they put music in the video the hadn’t intended showing as a movie?
I find it so weird that some people hate this movie so much. I’m not sure what they were expecting on a 15k budget. It isn’t the scariest movie of all time, that’s for sure, but it certainly works for many people.