Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Dark_Stryke Nov 01, 2010 1:56:37	Hey, so, for halloween this year me and a group of my friends went out to see Paranormal Activity 2, and I've decided to give a review/rant about it here. Major spoilers abound, but I'll try to keep it all in spoiler tags. So, to start off with, my general feeling about the movie: A resounding meh. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't very good, either. It does a good job of building up suspence, but doesn't really go anywhere from there. It winds up the tension, but doesn't really ever manage to do anything with it. It's also a prequel to Paranormal Activty 1, which is... strange. Why exactly did they call it number 2? Oh, and the ending can be called precisely described as abrupt. Two minutes to wrap up the plot, ten seconds of action, then a little blurb about what happens to one of the characters who wasn't on screen at the ending. I was left scratching my head about the whole thing. It was like the movie had just started going and then it just ended. Anyway, on to spoilerrific complaints. Paranormal Activity 2 Alright, if you're still here I'm assuming you've either seen the movie or don't care to see it, so I'll glibly spoil any plot point I feel like. So, firstly, I'd like to say that the overall idea was pretty neat. I do like that it was shown as a sort of "home movie" style, as if everything were real. But, I feel the movie failed to properly utilize this angle. The attempt to make it seem real just added to the artificiality of certain parts. The clichéd characters of the father and the mother were the most painful parts of it. The father staunchly refuses to believe the house is haunted even when presented with very solid evidence that things have gone horribly screwy (his justification for the pool scrubber was particularly poor. He can't come up with anything even remotely resembling logic for it climbing the side of the damn pool so he just makes a joke about it being particularly motivated. His family accepts this for some unexplainable reason). The mother is pretty bad herself, though in a different way. She's one of the first to catch on that something isn't quite right within the house, and yet her response, instead of doing anything at all, is to hope that she can ignore it and it'll go away. Even when things start getting worse and worse. The daughter is the only bright spot in the film. She's rather genre savvy, even going so far as to document the weird things she sees on video, but she is continually disregarded by every other character. She was the only one I could even remotely identify with. The whole family was like two horror movie stereotypes and a random audience member. Now, on to the "demon" itself. What. The. Hell. Its motives, actions, and abilities are never properly explained, and become quite inconsistent throughout. Why does it keep doing things for no other purpose than to announce its presence to the family? Like banging all the cupboards open at once. Why? One of my friends pointed out that it may "feed on fear" to become stronger, but that explanation doesn't fly when you consider that it pulls the pool skimmer out of the pool every night for weeks when it's quite clear that the father is entirely indifferent to it. Why does it provoke the nanny, who is shown to have spiritual abilities that actually seem to work? Why announce its presence to the one person who is adequately equipped to fight it? Was it all a xanatos gambit hoping the father would come home and see her burning incense, then have an epic freakout over a relatively minor thing, and fire her despite the rest of the family either not caring or supporting her? Oh, incase you couldn't tell, I found that plot point ridiculous. After the demon takes control of the mother, why doesn't it immediately leave with the baby? There's nothing stopping it. It has absolutely nothing to gain by sitting around and doing nothing for a day. Clearly it doesn't care about leaving witnesses or it wouldn't have left the daughter alive. Did it have to kill the father or something? Why didn't it just do that while the father was sleeping after getting back from treating the dog? Why did it let the father leave and potentially bring the recovered dog back? It had been shown that the dog could at least sense the demon, if not fight it directly, so why would it just sit around for a day with its goal within reach, when it could potentially be set back to right where it was before? Again, nothing to gain. Oh, and let's talk about the ending, which makes this into both a prequel and a sequel to Paranormal Activity 1. If demonic posession gives you powers like Super Strength and Teleportation, how come the demon doesn't use either of these effectively beforehand? If it could just teleport behind the father and snap his neck like it was nothing, why didn't it bother to do that earlier? Seems to me like cross or no cross, there's no way it should have lost to the father when it was posessing the mother. All of which leads me to my ultimate conclusion: The demon is just a dick. A complete and utter dick. It doesn't have some nefarious agenda, it's just a huge jerk that gets a kick out of messing with and ultimately killing people. Sort of like if that guy you really hate at the office had super powers and was also a mass murderer. Maybe this analogy is falling through.
#2 jesse.two.coins Nov 01, 2010 6:16:16	haha great review!!!
#3 scypio Nov 02, 2010 8:03:44	Rant on the first movie since I didn't see the second one I thought the first Paranormal Activity was god awful. I don't understand how it could be considered scary and nothing happens. There's scenes of them sleeping and a door closes... wow, that's scary. In addition, the characters just so unlikable that it was a relief when they were killed. The guy is such a bro that he literally yells at a demon to try to make it stop bugging him. He also is such a controlling douchebag who has no consideration for his girlfriend. She's  obviously concerned and all he does is make jokes and stuff. The girl is no better. She is probably the weakest character in the history of horror movies which is saying a lot. She is totally unable to do anything without her abusive boyfriend's permission; she literally cannot even make phone calls without her douchebag boyfriend's approval. She's clearly retarded since she's supposedly been haunted for her entire life, but it didn't occur to her to look up information on the internet until her mid to late twenties. And again, since nothing happens in the whole movie (to be fair, stuff does happen in the second half of the movies, but its pretty boring), you only have the stupid characters to pay attention to.
#4 jesse.two.coins Nov 02, 2010 8:20:35	watch it with me? lmao
#5 adun_irving Nov 02, 2010 14:24:03	Around my college campus, it was because people were so stupid that they thought it was a documentary. People were scared out of their wits because their attention spans are so short that they cannot remember the disclaimer at the start saying, "The Following is a Work of Fiction." The first movie was an atrocity and a stain on horror movies in general, and I'm never going to see the second because I was so thoroughly disappointed with the first. Not to mention, y'know, they give away the big final scare in the damn preview...
#6 Cpt_Micha Nov 02, 2010 21:25:48	God the first one was a Train Wreck. Watched it courtesy of netflix I think. Yeah.  My God. My effing god. It made no damned sense. I have one justification for the stupidness of the girl.  The demon thing reincarnates every so often. But still. Ugh. I can't believe it got a sequel.
#7 Dark_Stryke Nov 03, 2010 2:50:51	Oh, another thing that bugged me. The first couple times the demon does something, there's no warning. It's startling, at the very least. Later, any time the demon is about to do anything, you get a low bass rumble, and the camera faintly vibrates, which totally kills the suspence. I mean "Oh hey, the camera is shaking again. I wonder if the demon is about to do something? Derp."
#8 jesse.two.coins Nov 03, 2010 7:34:03	wasn't the first one more famous for HOW it was filmed rather than the actual content?
#9 scypio Nov 03, 2010 8:27:49	wasn't the first one more famous for HOW it was filmed rather than the actual content? Yeah, its pretty much this decade's "Blair Witch Project".
#10 jesse.two.coins Nov 03, 2010 8:37:21	wasn't the first one more famous for HOW it was filmed rather than the actual content? Yeah, its pretty much this decade's "Blair Witch Project". thats silly but I still haven't watched it
#11 Finarvyn Nov 03, 2010 22:42:33	Wasn't impressed with the first one, so hadn't planned on seeing the second. Thanks for the review, because it just reinforces my desire to not see it.
#12 Mad_Jack Nov 04, 2010 0:57:36	I never got past watching the tv ads for either one of them. As far as I could tell, having seen The Entity and the Poltergeist movies several decades ago, I didn't really have a need to see PA I&II...
#13 Nyarlathotep Nov 04, 2010 17:17:28	Never saw the first one and only saw this one because the wife and I were bored and when we decided to watch a movie it was literally the movie playing closest to the time we got to the theater.  Had we decided to watch a movie a few minutes earlier we would have ended up seeing a chick flick with the Blond chick from either Grey's Anatomy or Scrubs, I get them confused.  Had we decided a few minutes later, we would have seen Saw 3D. Gosh, how I wish we had decided to go watch a movie a few minutes earlier or later.  I am no fan of Romantic Comedies, and the idea of yet another Saw sequel makes me roll my eyes all the way back in my head, but there is no way either could have been WORSE than Paranormal Activity 2.  It was bad on every level I can think of.  Plot, acting, logic, 100% pure stupid all the way around. As for specifics, The OP covered it pretty well in the spoilered part of his post.