Paranormal Activity

"Paranormal Activity" is a horror movie that was made in 2007, on one of the smallest budgets the universe has ever seen. It started playing in a few areas a couple months ago and due to popular demand is now released nationwide and making an awful lot of money. It would be kind of pointless to list the director and the actors here like I usually do since they are all no names...and this is either their first movie or darn close to it.

"Paranormal Activity" is about this couple, Katie and Micah, who move into a house together. Of course their house is not normal because if it were then there would be no point in this movie. The house is essentially haunted...all of the strange occurrences happening at night. Katie thinks it may be demons that have been following her throughout her life. So her boyfriend decides to set up cameras while they sleep to try and figure out what is going on in the house. The whole movie is the footage from his camera.

The movie got a lot of a hype. And for the most part I did not think that it lived up to it. Although the movies is not boring - it's not really long enough to get boring and the plot is pretty interesting - it could be very slow at times. This mainly is seen in the beginning where very little happens...or so we think...leading up to the climax.

Like I mentioned before, the movie is low budget...we are talking only thousands of dollars here. It is basically all handheld cameras used throughout which leads to an extremely shaky movie. Which makes sense for the kind of movie this is, but it can get distracting. The movie doesn't even have opening are closing credits...so that kind of caught me by surprise. I've got to say that it is really impressive that such a low budget movie is now being shown all over the country.

The acting in the movie is okay...nothing too awful. We essentially are just working with random people here as opposed to actually actors, so that makes sense. The guy in this is also pretty annoying. He's trying to solve the whole possessed-house thing on his own when in reality all he and his girlfriend need is Tangina (aka: the midget from "Poltergeist") to remove any unwanted spirits from the house.

I feel like the poster lied to me...I was told "Don't see it alone" and after seeing it I feel like I could, in fact, definitely see it alone as it wasn't as scary as so many people are making it out to be. Then again I don't get scared during movies...but if I was one to get scared I would have only been scared a couple times...mostly near the end.

So basically, I found the movie just a little scary near the end and for the most part pretty slow...too slow to call it suspenseful...but given what little they had to work with it's pretty impressive...just don't believe all the hype that has been heaped on the movie. 2 out of 4 stars.

-Joseph Sbrilli