CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2
by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

(SCENE 1: We see the outside of a house. The words “NIGHT # 1, October 23, 2010, 2:45am” appear on the screen)

(SCENE 2: Inside that same suburban house. All the lights are out, and MICHAEL ARRUDA and L.L. SOARES are sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark)

MA: Did I tell you the one about the priest, the rabbi, the minister, and the talking baby sitting at a bar?
LS: Shh! You’ll scare the ghosts away.

MA: I thought you said we were waiting for demons?

LS: Ghosts, demons. Same difference.

MA: Aah, not according to the movie we’re reviewing tonight, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2. It makes a distinction between ghosts and demons that I found interesting, that ghosts are the spirits of people, but demons are evil entities.

LS: The folks who made this film have obviously never met Hellboy!

(There is a huge BELCH, and both LS and MA jump. The light goes on and HELLBOY enters.)

HELLBOY: Pay no attention to me, boys. I’ll be out of here in a jiffy. (opens refrigerator and pulls out a couple of beers). Abe Sapien’s having a bad night. I’m cheering him up. And for the record, (addresses camera), I’m a demon, but I’m not evil. (Burps, and house shakes again.) Exits and shuts off light.

MA: I can’t see a damn thing. Ow! Who just hit me?

LS: I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

This week we’re reviewing the movie PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, the sequel to the 2008 hit, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, which I reviewed on this very site not long after we launched it. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was one of these small horror flicks that became a big success mostly due to word of mouth.

The first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was about a couple, Katie (Katie Featherstone) and Micah (Micah Sloat), who move in together in a new home that appears to be haunted. Lots of very bizarre things start happening, so Micah gets a video camera to tape the goings-on. And things just get continually weirder and more dangerous from there. At one point, a medium comes to their house to communicate with the ghosts, but he leaves soon afterwards. He tells them what is haunting the place is not a ghost. It’s a demon.

MA: Which would be bad, since demons are evil.

(HELLBOY’S voice off-camera): I heard that!

LS: As the camera films them, especially in their bedroom while they think they’re sleeping, the scares get spookier and spookier, culminating in an effective shock ending.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 confused me at first, because I thought it was a sequel. It really isn’t. It’s a prequel. It takes place 60 days before the first movie and focuses on Katie’s sister, Kristi Rey (Sprague Grayden), and her family. When Kristi and her husband Dan (Brian Boland) bring home their new baby boy, Hunter, things start getting very strange in the house. There are weird noises, frying pans move and crash to the floor, cabinets open by themselves. Unlike Katie in the first movie, Kristi doesn’t get an expert to diagnose the house, but Dan does have motion-sensitive cameras put in every room after they come home one day to find the house trashed (and assume there was a break-in), so we can observe what is going on.

Like the first movie, PA2 is totally told from the point of view of cameras, just like the movie that obviously inspired both of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY films – THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999).

(SCENE 3: We see the outside of a house. The words “NIGHT # 2, October 23, 2010, 10:12pm” appear on the screen)

(SCENE 4: Inside the house and back in the kitchen)

LS: What the hell happened? I was right in the middle of talking and it suddenly skipped like 17 hours, according to my watch!

MA: It’s the way things work in this movie. Might as well go on with the review.

LS: Freaky….

Anyway, the way you know PA2 is a prequel is that early on, Katie and Micah from the first movie come over for a visit, and, as people who saw the first movie know, Micah is no longer among the living.

At first, Dan thinks Kristi is a little loopy when she starts telling him about weird happenings. And she’s not the only one. Their nanny, Martine, is constantly praying to herself and lighting incense to spread around the house (to ward off evil spirits), so Dan gets fed up and fires her.

It’s teenage Ali (Molly Efraim), Dan’s daughter from a previous marriage, who starts putting things together, by doing research on the Internet. Once Ali starts to believe her, Kristi doesn’t feel so nuts, but Dan still refuses to believe either of them, even when confronted with evidence (mostly filmed by the cameras in the house). He just continues to state that he doesn’t believe in this stuff, like that is going to protect him from the wrath of household demons.

Whatever the demon is, it seems to be very interested in young Hunter.

The interesting thing about the movie is that it actually does explain how the demons got from their house to Katie and Michah’s. The last part of the new movie also gives us a legitimate sequel to the first film – as it suddenly jumps to the day after the end of Part 1.

I really liked the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. Somehow, despite having no budget, no name stars, and just doing tricks with sounds and simple effects, the first film was very effective, and actually had some good scares. PA2 carries on in this tradition. Even though it’s a sequel, it’s a satisfying return to the territory of the first film, giving us some interesting answers along the way—before and after the events of the first one.

MA: I liked this one too, but not as much as you. I enjoyed the story, and I liked the characters. I thought the family members were likeable enough, especially the dad, as his sense of humor was pretty funny. He gets a little annoying later on in the movie, as he continues to refuse to believe in what’s going on, at one point making the ridiculous decision to leave his teenage daughter alone in the house with his infant son and “comatose” wife, (she won’t get out of bed)—the night after they’re all shaken up by the weird occurrence of their family dog being injured—because he has a meeting he can’t miss. Thanks, Dad!

I also enjoyed the teenage daughter a lot. She acted liked a teenager without being too angst-ridden, a trait we’ve seen a lot in recent years in characterizations of teenage daughters. She’s also in one of the funnier moments of the film, when she and her boyfriend play with a Ouija board. Even better, this very funny moment is quickly followed by a very creepy moment.

LS: The teenager daughter, Ali, is my favorite character in the film. She also seemed to be the smartest one (no surprise there). I liked her scenes the best. Plus she had great taste in music, with posters of The Misfits and The Ramones on her wall.

MA: Most of all I enjoyed being scared by this movie. The film does a good job making you feel uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable throughout most of this movie, and the audience I saw it with also seemed to enjoy being scared. There was lots of nervous laughter, and even a couple of screams. So, if you like being scared, for this reason alone, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 is worth your while.

LS: Considering how many recent horror films don’t have scares at all (MY SOUL TO TAKE comes instantly to mind), the fact that PA2 is so good at generating scares and thrills is a big deal. Especially since it had a fraction of the big Hollywood movies’ budgets.

MA: The problem I have with PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 is that its scares work because they prey on our universal fear of being alone at night in a house. As anyone who has spent time in a house (which means pretty much all of us, folks!) knows, being alone at night can be daunting. Houses make noise, lots of noise. Floors creak, furnaces and hot water heaters go on and off, windows rattle, wood beams shift, you name it. It’s very easy to let your imagination run wild. Throw in a family dog, which has far better hearing than you do, and which may start barking or whining in the middle of the night, and that’s creepy, too. And having to walk through your dark house at 3:00 in the morning to attend to your crying baby, which those of us who have kids have all had to do, that’s scary, too.

(Tiny footsteps are heard padding through the kitchen. The refrigerator door opens, and the light of the fridge reveals a BABY standing there in pajamas looking inside. He turns to MA and LS.)

BABY: Don’t mind me, guys. I can help myself. I can’t sleep. My laptop’s charging up, so I figured I’d come down here for a cold one. (Pulls out a baby bottle.)

MA: What the hell are you?

BABY: What does it look like? I’m a friggin baby! Can’t you see that?

LS: We know that, but—you’re talking!

MA: And walking!

BABY: So? In my family we walk and talk right out of the womb. Haven’t you ever seen those E-trade commercials? That’s my big brother.

Sheesh! What a couple of dopes. (EXITS).

MA: That was weird.

Anyway, my point is that PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 takes full advantage of these fears, and so its scares are based on these common experiences, rather than simply by what’s going on in the movie. These things are scary in and of themselves. They don’t need a supernatural element to make them frightening. So, I’m not sure the film succeeds in scaring me at that level. Sure, it was scary because a demon might be involved, but for the majority of this movie, we don’t see any demon, and we’re frightened because we’re in the silent dark with these characters waiting for that unexpected loud noise to scare us, which it does.

And for a movie that had lots of slight scares throughout, it really is lacking that one major jolt to put it over the top.

I also thought that early on, a lot of the nighttime shots labeled “Night #2,” “Night #3,” etc. grew repetitive, as not much happens during these scenes. Frankly, I was sick of seeing the same shots of the swimming pool and the front door over and over again.

(SCENE 5: Outside of the house. The words “NIGHT # 3, October 24, 2010, 11:22pm” appear on the screen)

(SCENE 6: Back in the kitchen)

LS: What the ….

MA: Time jump again. This is getting tiresome.

LS: You’re telling me. I want to finish this review before I get too old. Get back to what you were saying.

MA: I wasn’t entirely satisfied by the film’s resolution, either, because I didn’t necessarily buy the supernatural explanation. Without giving the story away, a person doesn’t have to be possessed to do crazy things. I wasn’t convinced by the events in this movie that a demon was responsible.

I also wanted some outside perspective. For instance, did anyone else ever watch the video footage of the mother being dragged through the house by an invisible person? If so, this would go a long way in convincing me that bad old Mr. Demon was responsible

LS: Would it be “outside perspective” if someone else in the family saw it? And anyone outside the family wouldn’t have access – except for us. And WE SAW THE FOOTAGE.

MA: The police would have access. I just wanted a scene where someone else saw that scene, to verify what we saw.

The fact that we saw the “footage” means nothing to me. What are we supposed to be watching anyway? Discovered footage of the family’s security tapes? A documentary of these events made by a filmmaker? I don’t think so, because any filmmaker is conspicuously absent. The film doesn’t do a good job giving us perspective outside the family’s cameras, and as a result, doesn’t really deliver a well-rounded story.

LS: I don’t know.  It worked just fine for me.

MA: Another problem I had is when bad scary stuff starts happening—would you grab a camera and start filming? That would be the last thing on my mind. I buy using the night vision so you could see in the pitch black darkness, but in one scene the daughter hears a noise in the house at night, and she grabs her camera to record it. I wouldn’t want to be walking through darkened hallways after hearing loud noises in my house holding a camera in front of my face.

LS: Most of the movie is captured on cameras installed in the house that have motion sensors. So that makes sense (I guess). As for Ali going through the house with a video camera in that scene—hell, I just thought she was a brave kid.

MA: I guess. She’s braver than I would have been!

LS: One thing I was wondering is why was this movie rated R? There’s no gore, no nudity, and what violence there is doesn’t seem that excessive. The first movie got a PG-13. Why didn’t this one? And the theater I went to was actually enforcing it for once – making sure no one under 17 got in. And there was no reason to. We’re not talking CALIGULA here.

MA: I agree. It wasn’t excessive at all.

LS: In some scenes, very simple things happen, like pots and pans suddenly moving, cabinet doors opening, doors opening and closing, and yet they generate real scares and had the audience on edge (every once in awhile, you’d hear someone scream).

MA: Yep. And I liked this, as it was creepy, scary, and fun, but again, I thought the next step was clearly missing, that being the jump from simple scares to a big-time, memorable fright.

LS: I suppose I agree. Some people in the audience reacted to the ending pretty strongly, but I didn’t find it all that scary. There was no big, powerful “GOTCHA” scene here. But there were enough smaller ones that really worked—and a consistent sense of tension throughout —so I think people felt satisfied.

MA: I think a really big fright would have made this a better movie, especially towards the end. I mean, there’s a lot of build up, but no major pay-off.

LS: There is a scene in the commercial for PA2 that takes place in Hunter’s room. Their dog, Abbie, is barking at the bathroom door, and suddenly we see a woman standing there. It’s an effective scene, but it is not in the final film.

MA: I would have to say, this was my biggest disappointment with this film, because I liked that scene, and I was looking forward to it in the movie. Shame on you, moviemakers! I hate it when scenes appear in trailers and then they’re nowhere to be found in the final film. Rip-off!

But taken as a whole, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 is not a rip-off. It’s actually a very scary way to spend 90 minutes. Just don’t expect anything classic or riveting to the point where you’ll be telling all your friends about it. It might make you leave a light on before you go to bed the night after seeing it, but don’t expect any lifelong nightmares.

LS: Oh, I totally disagree about the “telling your friends” part. The first movie became a hit because of word of mouth – and a very effective viral marketing campaign. I think the second movie is just as strong, and works on the same level. You and I might not have found it as scary as it could have been – but most of the people in the audience seemed genuinely scared by the goings on. And believe me, they’ll tell their friends. This one will be as big a hit as the first one.

MA: Perhaps. And if people want to tell their friends to go see this movie because it’s scary, all the power to them, but I don’t think there’s that much to talk about.

LS: And yeah, I don’t see any nightmares in my future. And I won’t be leaving any lights on. It was effective while I was watching it, but I don’t think it will really stay with me on any level.

But I have to admit, I really liked this one for what it was. I give it three knives. How about you, Michael?

MA: I liked it, too, but just a little less than you. I give it two and a half knives.

(The lights suddenly come on, to show an attractive woman standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She’s dressed only in a sheer nightgown and appears to be in a trance, and is growling)

LS: Sweet! Talk about hospitality!

MA: I don’t think she’s here to make us feel at home. She looks possessed.

LS: Sorry we drank all your beer, lady.

(The woman lunges at them and the lights go out, followed by screaming)

-END-

© Copyright 2010 by Michael Arruda and L.L. Soares

Micheal Arruda gives PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 - Two and a half knives!

L.L. Soares gives PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 – Three knives!