I post no spoilers in my reviews.
All in all I went into this with a sense of laughability due to the moronic commercials Ive seen where they used a night vision camera to show kids being scared in a theater while watching this movie. Kids dont know whats scary anymore, they think loud noises and shit jumping out suddenly is scary when its just surprising, I would be surprised if a dog jumped through my window but doesnt mean I would be scared of the dog. And I actually saw a claim "Scariest movie ever!" and thats a bold fucking statement. It all stank of cheap marketing tactics meant to drag in teens who would buy into it. This is Owen Peli's first movie of which he wrote and directed and is cast with equally no one I recgonized before.
Direction: Ugh, its shot in that fucking documentary style where the entire movie is shot with someone carrying around the camera so obviously there is nothing that paticullary well done and nothing we havent seen done in any other number of Blair Witch'esque type movies. I understood why they did it here as its supposed to make the movie seem more like its happening and explains alot of whats going on and how your able to see it but still this gimmick for movies is getting old, or I should say has gotten old. Bascially you just have 2 ways of the movie being show, 1- someone is carrying around the camera or 2- the camera is setup on a tripod to show stuff as people sleep or whatnot. Nothing special here and nothing you havent seen in a dozen other movies.
Acting: This was decent enough when it comes to the girl Katie. She didnt totally immerse herself into her character since her character was just a average "normal" girl and nothing else. And the guy Micha was your average guy who wanted sex alot, didnt get scared but only got mad and yelled at the ghost with lines like "You dont mess with my girl, Ill show you!" Its all just pretty much par for the course horror movie acting.
Storyline: The story oddly enough was pretty thin for a movie thats actually interesting. The atmosphere and sounds are what made the movie what it was. I do admit though I liked how they didnt feel the need to explain everything in exacting detail. You got a little backstory as to what was going on but not much, the story of what was currently going on wasnt much and got no real explanation but it worked for this. Sometimes not showing everything or telling everything has a better impact than flushing out ever single thing. My biggest complaint was the pacing. I understand you have to ramp up tension in a movie like this but 3/4 of the movie was slowly building and past 1/4 was diced between building a little faster and "BAM" everything happens. I wish they would have made the progression a little more even to keep increasing the pressure on the viewer instead of giving them comfort zones. My biggest problem though was the ending, it was fucking stupid and cheap. It ruined my experince with the rest of the movie by doing the exact same shit a hundred other movies have done and I was pissed because it just copped out and I felt like it was saying "Yeah your a stupid kid, you wont care about the ending because you dont know any better".
Effects: The sound is what really drove this movie in retrospect. The dead silence or noises from the house or slamming doors and such are what really made this movie scary, without them it would have been total shit. Everything had its place to and was often so subtle you couldnt really tell if you were hearing something or not. The visual effects were top notch, well what little there were since the movie really had no real visual effects except on 3 or 4 occasions. One in paticullar that happened on the 20th night I think it was actually impressed me at how real it looked.
Overall: Well was it scary? To me it was a little but then again Im a hardcore horror fan and Ive seen more fucked up shit in my short life than most have in their whole lives so its hard to scare me with anything let alone a movie. I can see how younger people or more senseitive people could be scared by this movie. I will say it left a certain imprint on me as I drove home at 130am that last rest of the night, I actually felt like I could understand the fear someone would have in that situation if it were real but that sense was long gone fairly quickly. So is it scariest movie of all time? Hell no its not, it is pretty good for just another documentary style movie though, but compared to most of them thats not hard to accomplish. But sadly I dont think the experince will translate to home video since again the sound is a big portion of it and seeing it on a small screen will make alot of its luster fade and once youve seen it, youve seen it. I enojyed myself and liked it but its kind of a one shot deal. I may have liked it better if not for the fucking cheap ass ending though, I cant come up with a male point of view analogy for the ending so Ill pretend Im a pretty young girl and I love dick for my ending comment and say "The ending of the movie was like sucking a nice beautiful cock then the guy cums old rancid mustard flavored jizz in your mouth unexpentantly and the whole experince is ruined".
To note though this movie is recieving most its praise because people on the whole believe in it being scary before they even have seen it and its gained so much attention from what I call "The rock on tv" phenomenon. Basically its this, if you took a rock and put it on a tv chanel and just showed the rock every hour for 15 seconds and nothing else and waited say a week, if you put that rock in a mall under glass people would walk by saying "Hey, isnt that the rock on tv?" and pretty soon they will be having their pictures taken with the rock and show their friends and tell them how cool it was to see the rock. So more or less with careful marketing, even a fucking rock can be cool to idiots. Im not saying people who like this movie are idiots but they definitely have bought into the hype that was created with twitter over this because it started with Paramount twittering how fucking horrifying this movie is and how scary it is but most importantly, how limited it was in showings. So naturally everyone started talking about and it built and built till you get a bunch of people scared and excited over something they havent seen and dont know why! But hey, its popular and they are in on it!
I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/paranormalactivity/
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