It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in Dublin when I pegged it down from The Barge to Movies@Dundrum to catch a half empty screening of PA2. Half empty but populated by teenagers. Which was actually ok to be honest, it added a bit of atmosphere to the proceedings. A crowd of girls screaming definitely made some things seem scarier than they were. Actually that’s not true at all but it was nice to see someone was scared.

I was gonna ramble on but you know what? I can’t be bothered. Fact is I think this movie was a complete waste of time. I mean seriously, didn’t I see this film last year?

I know this is absolutely my own fault really. I listened to the hype. I’d heard that this one was better than the first one and, rather naïvely, I had assumed that this might because they had gone the way I wanted them to go. That is, I imagined that they might have moved away from cheap jump scenes and into a more creepy, insidious, psychological type of a scare. In my mind this is what “better” meant. Obviously I was wrong. Apparently “better” means… No… I still can’t work out what “better” meant in this context. Wait, maybe they were referring to the fact that the makers have switched over to using more static cameras. This one didn’t make me feel like I was going to puke… I guess that could be one thing that was better.

To be honest, when I first left the cinema I wasn’t that annoyed with this film, I never am that annoyed straight away. That’s probably because I’m all hopped up on sweets and popcorn. It’s only after about 20 mins that I settle into what I’ve just seen and start to pick at it… That’s when I really realised this film had nothing going for it. I was so bored watching it. So bored. Nothing happens. At one point I was just counting the number of times we saw the different camera views… I don’t have an eidetic memory I’m pretty sure that by the end of the film I could have drawn, in detail, all the views we saw and the layout of the house, no bother. An hour and a half of staring at CCTV footage with nothing happening. Oh wait, I tell a lie. There was that pot that fell down. Glad I spend €10 to see that.

As much as I disliked the first Paranormal Activity, I have to admit that it did have one thing going for it. It had a good idea. It was a small idea and it’s not one that worked for me at all, but I do think it was good. At the core of it I didn’t think Paranormal Activity was a bad film. I could see what they were doing, I just didn’t like it. Once you’ve used up that idea you need to move on. I don’t know how these guys have got away with churning out exactly the same film on a vastly inflated budget. Honestly, who green lit this script? Why? Why? And actually, how did they manage to spend so much more money making it. I hear the first one was made for $15,000. How did making exactly the same film cost like 200 times more? Seriously.

Whoops.

I said I wasn’t going to ramble on. I guess I was wrong. Look, straight up. I hated this film. It brought nothing new to the table. This was just blatant profiteering and I handed over my cash. What can I say, fool me twice.

You know what the worst thing is? They’ll probably fool me a third time as well… After all, I am ever the optimist.

3/10

Actually, because I’m in a generous mood, I’m going to give it one thing… but it’s a spoiler so you’ll have to highlight the brackets.
[I liked the haunted pool cleaner, that was funny.].

The force is strong with this one. Umm… the Paramount marketing force that is. This is apparently now the most profitable movie of all time. So of course, I wasn’t expecting much going in to it. Actually I genuinely wasn’t… I do wonder if I would have been better off carrying a bit of anticipation though, because as it was, I didn’t think that much of it. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been expecting so little?

In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that I felt very sick for the last 30 mins or so of this film. I was only queasy for the middle 30 mins. I’ve always had a problem with motion sickness and the whole shaky hand held camera really gets me. I can’t even watch people playing First Person Shooters and this was well beyond that. The last time I felt it this bad was at Cloverfield. It was a bit more tolerable during Cloverfield though. That might have been because the film was a bit more fun…

It’s not that Paranormal Activity was a bad film, it wasn’t. It was fine. As I think it through though, I realise that I can’t really point at the “best bit”. Because there wasn’t a best bit. But then again there wasn’t really a worst bit either. There was a stupidest bit, but I’ll leave you to pick your own, if or when you see it. There were also some pointless bits. And yes, there were some scary bits. I guess what I’m saying here is that it was a bit bitty.

My main problem with it was that it was cheap. Not that it was cheap looking but that the scares were cheap. It was real “things that go bump in the night” scary. There was nothing that was really… … let’s just say I kind of expected there would be a more insidious creepiness to it. It was all a very straight up “BE SCARED NOW!” kind of thing. I would have liked to have seen a bit more thought behind it. Not that I like jump scenes – like I said, cheap – but all the scares were pretty telegraphed and that was annoying. What’s the point of a jump scene you warn someone about?

Ah no, I’m not being entirely fair. I mean ok, I may have been watching a film starring the two least haunting aware characters I’ve ever seen but yer wan Katie really did have a great scream. I was well impressed with that. And I quite scared by it to a certain degree. I live alone in a two bed apartment and I’ve never been up to the attic so… uh… I’d rather not think about it. But it’s not like I had trouble sleeping or anything, it was no Exorcist and it was certainly no Event Horizon

In the end, I was disappointed by this film. Which is not to say that I hated it. Or that I think that people shouldn’t be scared by it. On the contrary, I think many people are genuinely scared by it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I save my disdain for people who are into the stuff like Michael Jackson: The Live Seance. I just didn’t think it was a great film.

I really think this might be one of those rare films that would be better on TV. I could imagine renting the DVD, watching it with a few friends and having a good time. Or watching it alone at home and being terrified. But in Screen 2 in The Savoy it just didn’t seem up to much.

Or who knows, maybe I was just put off by the nausea; it’s hard to appreciate an atmosphere when you think you might need to run to the bathroom to be sick any minute. I gotta start taking travel sickness tablets before watching these types of films…

5/10

NB: I am somewhat dismayed to see that there are plans for a Paranormal Activity 2… did Hollywood learn nothing from Blair Witch 2?

Also, shout out to the Paramount marketing team on this one. Great job folks.