Boo

I was sort of on a quick horror fix this past week.  Battle Royale you could argue for, though I qouldn’t quite call it horror.  More of an action film.  Let Me In, one of the best horror films I have seen since its predecessor.  And now, Paranormal Activity 2.

Paranormal Activity 2 is about a family that is being tormented by a demonic presence and must find a way to get rid of it.  As I heard about the first film, and experienced when watching the first film, Paranormal Activity 2 is basically a haunted house put to screen.  I don’t mean a movie about a haunted house.  I mean that it’s like going into a haunted house at an amusement park, but instead of actually being there, you are watching it all happen.

I knew something was distracting me in the film from the beginning.  Really, it was three things.  They were the only three things that made this movie any worse than the first.

The first problem I was having was that I knew the mother.  I couldn’t pinpoint why I thought I knew her until I looked her up on imdb.  She happened to be the president’s daughter in one season of 24.  This brings into account the credibility of Paranormal Activity 2.  It’s the kind of film that you shouldn’t know the actors or else it takes away from the experience.  Knowing who they are, the scary factor is lessened because you know they are fine.  It also falsifies the statements at the beginning and end of a film where the statements are supposed to be true statements.

Another problem I had was the references that were made during the film.  Many of the references were relevant to when the film was made, but the film took place three years prior.  This was very irritating.  I want to have the power that they have to see into the future.  Not for trivial purposes like they were using it for.  I just want to see the future in general.

The final real issue, aside from the convenient ending for one character, was that there were too many cameras.  The best part of the first Paranormal Activity was that it mainly took place in the bedroom, with a little bit of downstairs.  This meant that the crew had to work extra hard to pull off the effects and they needed to come up with some interesting ideas for the small space that they used.  With the amount of cameras that they used in Paranormal Activity 2, the ingenuity decreased.  They had more things to work with, so the stuff that they did was less interesting, in my opinion.

I would still recommend this if you want to get your jump scare on.  The jump scares are still effective, regardless of the imagination put into things.  In one of the strangest Flickchart rankings ever, Paranormal Activity 2 is placed at 810 between Cabin Fever and Welcome to Mooseport.