Got kinda drunk and watched a movie. Didn’t turn out as I’d hoped.
Okay, a long time ago I use to write movie reviews on my tumblr page, but I stopped because I found them to be kind of tedious and not really worth the effort. However, I just sat through Paranormal Activity 2 and I feel compelled to bitch about it. So here goes.
I saw the first Paranormal Activity a while back ago and I rather enjoyed it. I believe I saw the original version of it and not the theatrical version, which many people didn’t like, but I found it to be rather creepy even if it did perpetuate the notion that demons exists. (I often wonder if there are people out there who watch these types of films and are convinced that such things are real, but I digress.) I wanted to see the sequel only because I heard a review by someone who hated the first one but thought the second one was quite good. So going in to it I had high hopes and was in the mood for a scary movie that might actually scare me. Which brings me to what these types of movies are.
They are, for the most part, nothing more than a series of jump scares. The problem with jump scares is sometimes they’re done well, and sometimes they’re done shitty. The ones that are done shitty usually involves some character looking around for something, and then someone comes around a corner and scares them. This type of scare is a cheap scare in my opinion because they usually prompt the audience into jumping back (hence “jump scare”) by adding an orchestra hit to the soundtrack. It’s cheap, not scary, and nine times out of ten you can see them coming as soon as the main character looks puzzled and the scene becomes quiet for no apparent reason. Where jump scares work is when the audience isn’t prompted at all. They come about due to the atmosphere of the scene and the acting. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but at least these movies tend to respect the audience enough to decide on their own if it works or not. They don’t prompt them with music. If you care about the characters and if the actors do a good job, you don’t need sad music to tell the audience that the character is sad. And you sure as fuck don’t need to prompt an audience when something is scary. Either they find it scary or they don’t. Paranormal Activity 2 does something else.
Every fucking time before the “demon” does something fucked up, there’s a low rumble on the soundtrack. After about twenty minutes, every time I heard that low rumbling I thought, “Something’s about to happen” and “Oh, look, it did.” THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT IS TO ANTCIPATE SOMETHING HAPPENING THAT’S HOW THIS SHIT WORKS! Instead, after a while, whenever that low rumbling started, I’d start thinking, “I bet that door’s gonna slam shut” and “I bet that pan’s gonna fall down” to the point where any suspense that could’ve been built up was completely gone. I started watching this movie because I wanted a good scare and these types of movies (the creepy ones) are usually the ones I like, but this one just pissed me off. Note to filmmakers: If you make a movie like this, DON’T USE A FUCKING SOUNDTRACK! It doesn’t work, it’s never worked, and it never will work. If you want to present the movie as realistically as possible, don’t use a soundtrack, please. Trust your actors to convey the scariness themselves.
THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THIS AND THE FIRST FILM. As I said before, I saw the original cut of the first film so this made things rather confusing. As I remember, the main character from the first film was killed by the cops. Now the whole thing about Part 2 is that it takes place before the first film (making it, in fact, a prequel) so it’s no surprise that the main characters from the first movie show up here, but it IS surprising, and not in a good way, that one of the main characters from the first film shows up to kill the main characters in this one. Imagine if you will that you’re watching Forrest Gump and at the end of the movie Lt. Dan comes out of nowhere and snaps his neck. It wouldn’t make much sense now would it? That happens in this piece of shit movie. There’s a connection sure, but it’s so out of nowhere that it is neither shocking nor scary. It all happens in the last minute. Literally, everyone’s cool and saying how all the shit’s over and then neck snapped, woman pushed against camera, child stolen, the end. No shit. That’s how this movie ends. And the events leading up to it are so fucking confusing. I thought everyone was dead until they were, like, “three weeks later, everything’s cool, then dead.”
It’s a shame too because I thought the acting was really good. I liked the characters and there was a real possibility that this would be a good scary movie, but they fucked it up. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna watch the Blair Witch Project again.
