Now, lets start this off by saying I love horror films. Always have done, always will do. Ever since the days of Hammer Horror. Even throughout the 80's, I spent many a time watching good ones, ok ones and even the patheticly poor ones. Bruce 'Dont call me Ash' Campbell is my god and I hope the Saw franchise never ends.

The only problem is, im not easily scared. Im not saying that as a macho stand point but it is the truth. I do not know what it feels like to be scared while watching a movie or much else really. So in a way, I feel im missing out in part when watching a 'scary movie'.

So here comes 'Paranormal Activity'. Scariest movie of the year apparently. I was looking forward to this.
Everyone who I heard had seen it was scared by it.

Surely it must have something as that many people cant be wrong......surely?

The movie is based around this young couple who are experience Paranormal Activity in their house. So Micha (the boyfriend) goes out and buys a gorgeous video camera to try and record some of these happenings.
The film is viewed through the eyes of the said camera in a 'Blair Witch' style.

Now I remember the hype around 'Blair Witch'...... Is it true? Were the accounts real? and so on and so forth..

This was kinda replayed in the hype with Paranormal Activity. Even a couple of weeks after release the screen was still filled with pumped folk looking forward to a good scare. I took some time to monitor the people entering the screen and the majority of men were strutting their stuff in front of their girls or mates.
The smell of machismo was somewhat over-bearing as the 'I am man, protector of woman' attitude was spread like panic in a turkey farm in December.

So the energy was there,
the anticipation was high.
Everybody knew this movie meant business,
meant scares, meant thrill of a lifetime. But as it began,
all that excitement dissipated.  You knew you were supposed to be tense, ideally on the edge of your seat, as the small ticks of a door creaking or a light flashing appeared out of nowhere. When the night time clips show, you know something untowards will happen....... but what? Not much, thats what!
I guess being a researcher into the paranormal doesnt
really help when watching this film as it was just like being on a very quiet case study. You also start to go into auto-pilot and start to use critical thinking skills about whether certain things the stars, or the entity for that matter, is possible.

Once you get over the fact how a 23 yr old student and a 'Daytrader' could afford such a nice house, you slowly become more and more annoyed at the cast as the film progresses.
The film chops and changes between daylight hours where the householders are trying to live their lives and the night scenes when the activity is at its most active. Unfortunatly, the day time periods are quite dull and if it wasnt for the strange love between Micha and his camera, they would be pretty pointless.

Ok, so without giving too much away, how does it stand within the paranormal world? Not too highly I'd imagine as there were a few errors. The main one for me was during the EVP session where Micha films himself asking the entity questions. As we see through the camera, we hear nothing, but after he feeds it into his computer, he picks up what seems to be a groan. Now, forgive me if im wrong, but shouldnt we, as we're watching a recording, have heard it as he was doing it? hmmm slight overlook there me thinks.

Ok ok so im being picky. But really,
it is just like watching the footage
from a past investigation.
Not much happens for the first hour and twenty minutes. The bits where something does happen are quick and forgotten. I personally failed to see where the scares where. It was as though the director used every cliche in the paranormal book but this still fell short. I was alerted to the apparent scare scenes by the screams from people in the screen. Really, they were screaming at points. Kinda annoying but at least it let me know where the jumpy bits were.

So has this film any redeeming points? In a word, no.
I was bored shitless throughout the entire duration.
I also started to feel sorry for the entity and wanted to crawl inside the film and kill the characters myself!
 
To be fair, the final minute of Paranormal Activity is fairly good. Its just a shame that you have to sit through the rest of it to get to that point. If you were to just edit out the daytime scenes, it might just be worth a watch.
On the whole, its a hugely dissapointing film. 'Blair Witch' still holds the torch for cheap home-made camera effect films and even that wasnt exactly great.

It was really interesting to overhear people discussing the movie on leaving the cinema. I heard a couple of boys who were in company of about 3 others quipp that they wasnt going to sleep tonight! At least some people enjoyed it, even if it were 15 year olds.

So in short if you’re looking for a great post-Halloween scare, I suggest you skip Paranormal, and just rent a tried-and-true classic B-Movie from the 80's. Or better yet, give the Japanese horrors a go. You might be pleasently surprised.