Paranormal Activity: Why Do People Believe in this Stuff?

Paranormal Activity is one of those movies that just baffles me on how people actually liked it. I would hope that my collection, albeit small, of work has shown that I am not one to tackle the norms without at least putting a scrutinous eye to the medium I am looking at. When I heard about the whole "sign our petition to bring this amazingly scary movie to more than one theater" thing with Paranormal Activity, I was amazed that a movie would need a petition to be released. I now wish that no one would have signed the bloody thing.

**SPOILERS SPOILERS**

I don't do spoilers often, but when a movie was made and released three years ago, I think that people have had enough time to view it for themselves. However, if you haven't seen it, then I warn you ahead of time that their are spoilers in this review.

I don't know why this movie took two years to release. I guess maybe it adds to some realism factor that people want to believe that what happens in this movie is real, that some filmmaker got a hold of this footage and put it together, and waited until now to release it. I call BULL. This movie pulls a Napoleon Dynamite with it being released and then becoming popular later. I remember no one having gone to see Napoleon Dynamite in the theater and I only saw it after it came out on video. That's when it got its popularity where I live. That movie was also terrible.

The premise is that a woman named Katie and a guy named Micah... pronounced Mee kah not M/eye/cah, are living together in his house. Katie had been having paranormal things following her since she was eight and Micah decides to film everything that is going on around her. Be forewarned that I will be drawing parallels between this and Paranormal Entity, so I will be going back to my PA for Paranormal Activity and PE for Paranormal Entity when the comparisons arise again.

As she is in the house, all of the things begin happening again. A psychic comes over and tells them that they have an evil entity living in their house with them, and that it seems to be attached to Katie. So he says to get a hold of a demonologist for some reason. I say this because a demonologist is someone that studies demons. He doesn't get rid of them because historically that's what catholic priests do.

Over and over again Micah is told not to interact with the demon, and to not even provoke it or try to contact it in any way. So what's the first thing he does in bad movie fashion? That's right, he starts trying to tick it off. This leads to many things happening down to the point where Katie is possessed in the end. She walks down to the first floor of the house, off screen, and begins to shriek at the top of her lungs. Micah gets up and runs down there, also off screen, and he screams. We hear nothing for a few seconds until then we see Micah's dead body come flying into the room and knock the camera to the floor. When everything settles down, we see Katie standing over Micah's dead body and she gets down on her hands and knees and looks straight into the camera, where her face turns into what looks like the dead girl from the ring and then the movie cuts out.

Yes. That is the movie. The whole movie. There was nothing scary about it and in fact the two characters were so stupid that I almost stopped watching this movie. Micah's constant insistence that nothing paranormal is in the house is constantly being thrown out the window again and again when things begin to happen, and yet throughout the movie he is constantly fighting against this thing he knows he can't beat. If that sounds confusing, believe me, it's worse when you watch it. So really, him dying is all his own fault because he kept wanting to contact it and handle it himself. Idiot.

Acting in this movie is downright terrible. I'm not convinced that any of this is real and I'm certainly not convinced that any of these two characters are likable. Micah is an insult to men everywhere with his stupidity, and Katie is also just as dumb. Right in the middle of the movie she decides that she wants to stay in the house because "it's no use to leave because it'll just follow me," and "We should call the demonologist guy! No I'm tired of your experiments! Ok just try this one thing, but God help me if it doesn't work then I'm calling that guy." However the best line is when she is mad and says "No I don't want to leave the house, I'm trying to study." Um... am I the only one that notices the DEMON in the house trying to get to her? I guess I'm the only one that has been present to this information the whole time. Why would you bring up anything in the outside world anyway when we have never had anything from there come into this house? We never see either of them having a job or any type of school before this one scene, so what's the point of bringing it up?

The other problem that I have with this movie is that it is filmed in the guerrilla style. PA didn't move the camera quite as much as PE did, but at least in PE we got to see the action like with the girl at the end of that movie and with the mother near the end as well. I was not impressed with PA in the sense that the camera was like watching Blair Witch. It was an hour and a half of running from absolutely nothing and people screaming.

I can honestly say that the thing that hurts this movie for me the most, is that it was in theaters last year and it was released in 2007. I don't want to see a two year old movie. They could have made a better movie in the three years that this one came out. In fact, I think they did. That better movie was called Paranormal Entity and it came out in 2009.

This movie was not good. It didn't live up to its hype and it wasn't enjoyable. It was long, had pointless scenes that could have been cut for time, and it could have been more interesting if there was more than one camera angle like there was in PE. Don't see PA. If I can sum the movie up quickly I would say that it's a one and a half hour long film about wanting to leave the house. If this is the scariest movie of all time then I'd hate to see a real horror film. Support The Asylum and go watch Paranormal Entity instead.