Friday, November 27, 2009

Paranormal Activity is pants

I had the displeasure of watching Paranormal Activity last night and, as expected, it was a pile of wank.

I’m not a great fan of ghosts and demons anyway – real life murder and gore scares me much more – and I thought Blair Witch was two hours of my life I’ll never get back. Utter, utter non-scary garbage.

So, this film started badly – shaky camera and a leading lady with as much charm and charisma as a walnut. After half an hour nothing remotely scary had happened – unless you think a moving door is scary. I don’t. It was actually more comedy than thriller, the main guy cracked a few jokes now and then and made me laugh out loud.

I liked that he made fun of his girlfriend who was seemingly being stalked by a demon, and was determined to find the cause of it all. He wasn’t laughing by the end of the film though!

Seriously, if a demon was stalking you and you discovered that you’d get out of bed in the middle of the night and stand and stare at your sleeping boyfriend for…wait for it… three or four hours!!!!, wouldn’t you be totally freaked out? Filming themselves sleeping the pair discovered that the girlf has some strange night-time tendancies which she has no memory of, but she’s not all that freaked out by it and just comes across as a regular moody bitch who likes sniping at her man.

Even when she said she was upset I didn’t believe her one bit. And the things that happened could so easily have been staged. I’ve no idea if this is supposed to be real or not but there are some seriously arty camera angles which suggest it wasn’t made by amateurs. Funny how they always capture the good stuff on camera huh? And if you heard someone walking up the stairs would your first instinct really be to grab the camera? I don’t think so.

Spoiler alert!

Okay, so the end is a bit freaky, but still totally set up. It’s night-time and the couple are asleep in bed. She goes downstairs and you hear her scream. He wakes up and dashes to his girlf’s aid, this time not taking the camera with him. Silence. She returns upstairs, walking like a zombie, with a knife in hand and red stuff all over her white vest. Why do people only kill others when they’re wearing white? Then she sits at the foot of the bed and rocks backwards and forwards for almost 24 hours – right in front of the video camera (how convenient) until the police come round and shoot her dead. Great.

Utter rubbish, don’t bother watching it. Ghostbusters is much scarier!