Movie Summary of Paranormal Activity by Michael the Moviegoer.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY = ***1/2
“This Trick Is A Real Treat”
Just in time for Halloween, “Paranormal Activity” is here and probably playing at a theatre near you. Paramount is cautiously opening the film slowly across the country because they have no idea how to market it. It reportedly cost under $15,000 to make, so it would conceivably make a profit in less than half a day if it had a proper nationwide opening like most horror movies get. The test-the-water approach says a lot about how detached the big studios have become from movie audiences these days.
Everyone keeps comparing this film to “The Blair Witch Project”. Why? It really has only two things in common. They’re both low-budget films with no big-name stars that generated a pre-release buzz via the internet. The two films share nothing in common in terms of story or plot. “Paranormal Activity” is even in color and shot with a higher quality camera.
The genius of “Paranormal Activity” is that director Oren Peli is succeeding at being Sam Raimi with no budget. With no CGI effects, Peli’s film is every bit as frightening as Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell” from earlier this year. In fact, it reminds me of the pre-CGI-era horror classics of the 70s like “The Exorcist” where everything you’re seeing on the screen was actually filmed. There was no green screen giving the opportunity to add effects later. The jumping bed and the levitating body were effects that happened in front of the camera and the actors experienced them while performing a scene. That sense of realism has been missing from horror films ever since computers became filmmakers. “Paranormal Activity” brings it all back and proves that to be quiet and still can be more unnerving than loud noises with strobelight visuals.
The story is about a San Diego couple who believe they are being haunted by a demon spirit. They are played by actors I presume, although their character names are the same as their real names and their IMDB pages don’t contain a lot of other credits for them. They are Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat. Micah sets up a video camera in their bedroom to film the strange occurrences that happen after they fall asleep. But don’t make the mistake of thinking this is 90 minutes of a single shot of a couple in bed sleeping. There is much more going on here. The daytime scenes show a fun loving couple going through a bad stretch in their relationship. They are being tested. And the way they deal with it has more heart and carries more drama and more laughs than any horror film in recent memory. This is like “Poltergeist – The Reality TV Show” version.
DVD Double Feature: “Open Water” is a very different kind of horror film, but similar to “Paranormal Activity” in its ultra-low-budget. It deals mainly with two characters who have accidentally been left behind in the middle of the ocean by a tourist scuba diving group. For most of the film, we watch as these two people simply try to stay afloat and survive the circling of sharks. While “Paranormal Activity” is a lot of fun, for me “Open Water” is still the scariest film of this decade.
Michael The Moviegoer
