Let me start off by saying that this is both an addition and a second take on my friend Jeremy's Paranormal Activity experience that he posted here.
There can be no doubt that seeing it was an experience, as the studio has painstakingly gone out of their way to ensure. For me, this experience was unnecessarily frustrating and in the end, entirely disappointing.
The marketing campaign for the movie has been a smart move, no doubt, but at some point you need to cut the shit. I completely understand that such a small movie can't get full distribution. The amount of buzz the studio generated was impressive, but with only 18 theaters on board, I don't find the midnight-only showings very cute. While Orlando is lucky to have a theater showing it all, because of this midnight limitation, our theater will only show it 2 nights a week... and even after putting it into 2 theaters, things are still a sold out clusterfuck.
Last week, they turned hordes of people away after overbooking their free advance screening, just in time for them to realize that tickets for the only 2 paid showings that week were already sold out. People went from having a ticket to not even being able to buy one... just because 8 or 10 at night isn't as scary as midnight in a light sealed theater.
Coincidentally, these midnight showings at Universal Studios' theater are perfectly timed to let out in the perfect storm of traffic bullshit that I would never put myself in under any normal circumstances. What I am referring to is the 2am closing time of the multitude of Universal Citywalk's clubs and bars and the letting out of the theme park's massive Halloween Horror Nights... all of which share the same parking garage as the theater. I would like to call that particular parking garage at 2am, The Center of the Drunk Driving Universe.
Any somewhat responsible person that has exited Halloween Horror Nights at that time will know that, technically, I risked my life to see Paranormal Activity.
Now, having purchased our tickets over a week in advance, we arrived at the theater 30 minutes early to save our seats... at which point we are shown to the ticket taking line that is 200 people deep. Specifically, this is the ticket taking line for Paranormal Activity and all other ticket holders can walk right in without waiting. By the time our ticket is taken, it's been 30 minutes and the movie should be starting.
We go up the escalator and to the correct theater and there is another guy who checks our tickets and asks, "Did you save your seats?" I am entirely confused by this. Seeing as how there were about another 100 people in line behind us by the time we got in, I don't see what the problem could be. He says, "Only seats left are in the front row if you haven't saved your seats."
I say, "We were in line!" And he replies, "But you saved your seats first, right?"
"We were outside, in line to get into the theater for 30 minutes, how could we save our seats?"
So let me say that, strategically selling out every single showing by limiting said showings is made all the more annoying when the movie you are selling it almost entirely unwatchable from the front rows.
There is no excuse for the cinematography in this movie. Quite simply, it should not be shown in a movie theater. Technology has come a heck of a long way since Blair Witch, and opened a whole lot of doors for amateur filmmakers, but none of this was apparent in Paranormal Activity.
Obviously the movie wouldn't make very much sense if it weren't amateur, but the video quality and camera work was so bad that it actually made me somewhat dislike the character of Micah. Here he was, a geeky gadget loving guy that was reacting similarly to the way I would in the situation, but he can't even halfway operate this camera that is supposedly his baby. What I'm saying is, you've got a character bragging about all the money he spent on a camera... it wouldn't be out of line for the camera to be a little bit better and operated with a touch more finesse. Just because the movie gives us an excuse for it to look like shit, it shouldn't get a free pass... it's far shittier than it had to be.
All of that aside, it really isn't a good movie. The fact that there is actually a writer/director, separate from either of the actors is astonishing to me. I guess he did his job in the context of the movie, because I certainly didn't feel like anything interesting was written or directed. I will definitely give credit to the acting, as it was surprisingly great for a video shot movie.
To think that the movie was originally bought to be remade does not make any sense to me, as the movie does not have any original ideas contained within it. There are no twists or turns in the plot and what little attempt they made at adding a mythology to the "demon" didn't even try to make sense. Worse yet, I found the editing to ruin all of the scares, as the movie quite literally fast forwards straight to them. Spoiler Alert: All 20 times that it's the middle of the night and they are sleeping, a scare is coming! Even more disappointing still is that the preview shows so many of these scares, all the way down to the last shot of the movie.
But hey, at least seeing it at midnight in a packed theater really set the mood... actually, the audience was not nearly into it as I thought they would be. The reaction wasn't bad by any means, but it certainly wasn't worth limiting the showings and revenue stream. From what I heard on the way out, I don't think this thing will have the legs they think it does. The consensus was, it was more entertaining than Blair Witch... but that isn't much of a compliment.
Personally, I think the whole thing would have played (and certainly looked) 10 times better as a midnight pay-per-view event. It'd be far scarier in your own home than a crowded theater.
Of course, it still wouldn't take the title of scariest film of the year. It wouldn't even take the title of scariest film of the year about a young woman being followed and tortured by a demon spirit... that most certainly goes to Drag Me to Hell. Sure, Paranormal Activity could never compete with that kind of budget, but from a writing standpoint, it could have had at least 1/10th of Hell's cohesiveness. You knew what the demon was, you knew what it intended on doing, you knew where it came from and you were still shocked throughout.






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