Paranormal Activity Review by hypovolemic

Written by: hypovolemic

I've never been a diehard fan of supernatural horrors, but after all of the hype that surrounded Paranormal Activity, I of course had to see what all the fuss was about myself. Especially when people were labeling it one of the scariest movies they had ever seen.

For those who don't know, the movie focuses on couple, Katie and Micah who are being haunted in their home. Micah sets up a video camera to capture the supernatural phenomena, and the entire film is presented through found footage.

This movie is incredibly boring and slow, it was tedious to sit through. You're constantly left on the edge of your seat thinking, "okay, maybe NOW something is going to happen", but it never does. This plot is just so stale and cliche, and instead of being scary as it was supposed to be, the haunting was just laughable.

I can sum up the plot very quickly for everyone:

Night One:
- couple sleeps
- door opens and closes
- couple watches the footage in the morning and talks about it for 20 minutes.

Night Two:
- couple sleeps
- random noise
- Katie wakes up
- couple watches the footage in the morning and talks about it for 20 minutes.

And so on.
This scenario happens almost every 'night' and did nothing but make me lose interest.

The characters actually started off great and I really believed the actors did a good job portraying a couple. But unfortunately, as the film started to drag on and on senselessly, the characters quickly became annoying to watch. I guess we're supposed to sympathise with Katie, but as the haunting escalates, she gets overly dramatic while Micah becomes irritable.

As the movie continues on, you can see that Peli was obviously grasping for ideas to stretch the film out. For example, Micah finding the photograph of Katie in their roof above their bedroom or when they found a story on the internet of a woman who experienced a similar haunting. This is meant to be one of the scariest movies of 2009 and THIS is all Peli can come up with??

I understand that this was a low budget film and that it was meant to be realistic, hence the ever-so-nauseous found footage style, but the whole story and its development was a huge letdown. It was constantly missing something and it wasn't as thrilling as it could have been.

However, I'm giving props to the ending. After nearly dozing off, that part actually made me jump. This was probably one of the worst movies I've seen and way too overrated.

This is a community member review and not a staff member review. We appreciate and respect the opinions of our readers and are gratefull that they took the time to contribute it.

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