Review: Paranormal Activity 2

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Paranormal Activity 2

Last year, the audience at Fantastic Fest was among many around the country to enjoy a midnight screening of one of the most deeply unsettling and truly frightening films since a man tore off his own face in 1982's Poltergeist. With a shoestring $10,000 budget, handheld cams, and unknown actors, Paranormal Activity rode a wave of good word-of-mouth to exceed a $100 million gross. Writer/director Oren Peli scripted believable, sympathetic characters and created unbelievable effects, weaving them masterfully into a terrifying experience. With a $2.5 million budget, Paranormal Activity 2 puts shiny bookends around the first story, but doesn't quite live up to the hype.

An audience shouldn't have to do homework to watch a movie, but I highly recommend you brush up on Paranormal Activity before hitting the theater for #2. Set two months before its predecessor, Paranormal Activity 2 retcons the story to include the family of Katie's sister, Kristi, including her newborn son Hunter, husband Dan, stepdaughter Ali and faithful German shepherd. Again presented as found footage, the film begins with some establishing scenes shot on a home camcorder as the family returns home with the new baby. These shots introduce the characters and provide a tour of the house ... then the film cuts to perhaps a year or two later, when the same tape is used to record the aftermath of what looks like a home invasion. Every room of the house is trashed, except the nursery. Nothing is missing, except a necklace that was originally a gift from Katie. After this, security cameras are installed in every corner of the house, allowing for a much improved picture quality and multi-angle scenes.

This introduction is one of many things Paranormal Activity 2 gets right. The improved video quality makes it easier to watch, as does a cast doubled in size. The scares, when they come, are jump-out-of-your-seat quality, and the first one prompted half the audience to scream like the first drop of a rollercoaster. The story tie to  the first film is clever, and the characters draw you into the story. For example, there's the superstitious housekeeper who wants to protect the family from evil spirits, and the non-believing father who refuses to believe what's happening in his house. The greatest character, though, has to be the heroic family dog, Abby, who at times has the audience cheering and at other times almost weeping.

Unfortunately, for everything Paranormal Activity 2 gets right, it does something wrong. One of the biggest issues is pacing. Instead of building tension through the movie to a devastating climax, occasional shock moments are spaced too far apart, giving the audience too much time to relax and calm down. From a story perspective, the attacks also fail, since the first one we see (the one where every room is ransacked) is perhaps the largest manifestation of the demon's power and happens entirely off-camera. After this enormous unseen attack, the demon begins the next day with something so innocuous, you almost don't notice it: moving a pool cleaner out of the water and leaving it at the edge of the pool. That sounds like a letdown, doesn't it? It pays off in a later scene, but this is still underwhelming given the fact the very first thing the demon has done is trashed the entire house, off-camera.

This is another important flaw. While Paranormal Activity put it all out there, Paranormal Activity 2 relies heavily at times on off-camera action. The lights go out at key moments, and you see part of an attack from one camera when another camera in an adjoining room would give a much better view. This culminates in a basement shot (I was thinking at the time, replace "basement" with "attic"and you have the original Paranormal Activity) using night vision on the camcorder where it's really impossible to figure out what's going on. Finally, after a clumsily-executed exorcism, the film concludes with an attack so brief and unsatisfying, it makes the trailer-spoiled ending of Paranormal Activity look like Oscar material.

All this is not to say Paranormal Activity 2 isn't worth a look, it just doesn't live up to the magic of the first one. A little more polish would have improved this a great deal, as it feels like a high-budget, poorly-edited film school project. The funniest moment in this decidedly un-funny film involves a kitchen island that in one shot has a cutting board and some unidentifiable food, which disappears in a shot from another camera, and then reappears as different food in two successive shots from the first camera. The family must have been too scared to notice food appearing DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES. This, along with many many missed opportunities to scare the audience and a flat ending, manage to mediocritize what could have been a successful hellstorm of a movie.

That's not a ret-con..

That's not a ret-con. Ret-con changes/tampers with the stated history of a series. On the contrary the sequel did a nice job of tying in the events of the film to the events of the first film without tamping the timeline. Not a fan of this series, but that should be stated, as it was what i was impressed with the most with this film.