Paranormal Activity 2 (Review)

Let’s pretend for a second you are capable of great things. Crazy, I know. You start up a little fast food joint, serving hamburgers at a cheap price. You decide to call it McDonald’s. People absolutely love your product, and the next thing you know people are throwing up McDonald’s restaurants around the country, nay, the globe. Eventually your restaurant is no longer seen as original, but a corporate machine cranking out impersonal fast food to the lunch-breaking masses.

In a way, this is what begins to happen to Oren Peli’s creation in Paranormal Activity 2. Gone is the sense of a new frontier, of any originality. Out goes an artist’s vision, in comes the Hollywood sequel machine. His Paranormal Activity was rather ingenious in the way it got under your skin and stayed there. It was one of the few times I was truly terrified at a movie. We were watching a seemingly happy couple’s lives begin to fall apart due to a nasty demon, all while making the audience pee their pants. The key is that it felt truly real, and for the most part that verisimilitude is gone in the sequel, Paranormal Activity 2. After the original, one of the people I went with had to be convinced it was fictional. There will be no such confusion here. This film begins the process of turning his original idea into a franchise.

That doesn’t mean Paranormal Activity 2 is not effective. As an experience, I had a good enough time, and I even was scared early and often. However, I will be sleeping calmly tonight, because none of it felt like it was really happening. I liken this film to riding the Tower of Terror in Disney World. It’s scary as death when you’re riding it, but thrill rides don’t give you nightmares. The best scary movies do, and on that count Paranormal Activity 2 falls short.

If you REALLY want to know what the plot is, the film is kind of prequel. In fact, shall I propose a new term? Paranormal Activity 2 is a simultanoquel. The events happen just about alongside the events of the first movie. Katie Featherston, if you recall, was the female “protagonist” of the original film. This simultanoquel follows the family of her sister Kristi. They have a newborn son named Hunter, and not long after things get real crazy in the house. What follows consists of security camera footage of a darkened house. Long silence. Rustle rustle. Footstep… footstep… BOOM.

Watching this film is a slightly artificial experience, one that is best measured in statistics rather than the more qualitative methods I usually employ. How much one enjoys Paranormal Activity 2 is more related to the number of times they jump, laugh nervously or scream. The large audience I saw it with did all of those several times, and it was quite clear they were enjoying themselves more than I. In fact, I found the audience slightly more entertaining than the film itself. The great thing about this series so far is that these are movies that almost encourage discussion amongst the audience during the film, providing countless theories as to what exactly was going to go boom next.

It is now I bring the conversation back to McDonald’s, and that is where the Paranormal Activity films are going. They are about to become a product and will be pumped out year after year producing just about identical films each time until audiences get tired of it all. (See: Saw. Yes I’m aware that reads like “see-saw”. You finished?) This film begins the series’ transformation into an impersonal corporate machine. There will be a Paranormal Activity 3. Then 4. These things are so cheap to make that they don’t need the $100 million that the first got to be a huge hit. Making these is good business. That said, I’d take these films becoming a franchise over the more soulless torture films that populate multiplexes. It doesn’t change the fact that this is not a film, but a product designed to be sold for a profit.

How does it end? Well, just like every film of its type it hasn’t figured out how to stick the landing as well as it could. The Blair Witch Project is the only film that’s been able to pull off an ending of this style, but the first Paranormal¸ this summer’s potentially great The Last Exorcism, and now this film all blow it. I was able to accept it well enough here, though, because this is the future these films have planned for themselves. Whether or not I disagree doesn’t really matter. I’m just wondering whether the second sequel will also be a simultanoquel.

I realize this all sounds like a negative review, because looking at it objectively it’s a pretty bad movie. But it’s not here to win awards, but to be a fun nighttime experience for those seeking a quick scare. I, personally, don’t think it works on the same level as the original, but it certainly knows what it takes to give people a temporary case of the creeps. I recommend you see it quickly and in a crowded theater. In that case, it will be hard not to have a good time. Just about everyone there did when I saw it, because Hollywood is starting to realize it doesn’t take much to scare people, and Paranormal Activity 2 is the most primitive of horror movies, based on the fact that things going bump in the night is enough to terrify the strongest of us. It will be a huge hit.

Rating:  (out of 4)