When it was released nationwide this time last year, Paranormal Activity was a bigger hit than initially expected. Shot on an unbelievably minuscule budget, it pulled in a worldwide gross of nearly 200 million dollars and got a ton of positive reviews dating as far back as its festival run in 2007. While there was a certain level of backlash from people who thought it was an overhyped bore, it still proved popular enough to warrant a sequel. But while most studios wait two, maybe three years after a movie's release before making a sequel, here we are a scant twelve months later, talking about Paranormal Activity 2. I enjoyed the first one a lot, so let's go check out the second one.
To be truthful, the movie is really more of a prequel than a sequel, taking place roughly two months prior to the events of the first movie. At the center of the story is Kristi Rey (Sprague Grayden), the sister of the young woman tormented in the original Paranormal Activity. When she and her husband Daniel (Brian Boland) come home to discover someone has apparently broken in and trashed the place, they install a series of strategically-placed security cameras set to record 24 hours a day.
The cameras quickly begin capturing a number of strange occurrences. Lights flicker before turning themselves off, things begin moving around on their own, strange noises happen in the middle of the night, typical haunted house stuff. The family's housekeeper (Vivis Cortez) warns that there are evil spirits at play, but only Ali (Molly Ephraim), Daniel's teenage daughter from a prior marriage, seems to pay her any mind. Though she at first posits that the spirit could actually be her mother trying to communicate from beyond the grave, its increasingly malevolent behavior soon convinces Ali that it may be a demon that is targeting her one-year-old half-brother Hunter (William and Jackson Prieto).
When Oren Peli made the original Paranormal Activity, he showed that you don't need a ton of money, big-name stars, or buckets of blood to make an effective horror movie. All you needed was some suspense and a little spark to send a viewer's imagination running wild. Paranormal Activity 2 made the wise decision to avoid messing with what worked in its predecessor, giving us more of the same yet building upon it. It follows the same formula and makes it way more frightening. And while it borders on hyperbole, I have no problem calling it one of the best horror movies of 2010.
Stepping into the role of director is Tod Williams, who deftly taking over where Peli left off. He could have done something incredibly stupid and gone the Blair Witch 2 route, but Williams doesn't change what worked before. He takes the formula from the first movie and cranks up the suspense and the scares. Williams even borrows some of the original movie's scares and adds something new to them, making them even scarier. Doing so allows him to play with the audience's expectations. In using some of these familiar setups, he kindles an "oh no, not this again" feeling before spinning it in a different direction and scaring the pants off the viewer.
He also manages to effectively combine cheap scares and suspense. With each scene, Williams essentially places a nuclear bomb somewhere in a room. You don't know where the bomb is, you don't when the bomb will detonate or even if it will at all. But you know it's there, and just when you think it's gonna go off, it doesn't. And when you breathe that sigh of relief, that's when Williams lets loose. Sometimes it's a short scare, other times its prolonged. And in the last fifteen or twenty minutes, it's insanity. Williams knows exactly what he's doing, and the movie is a lot better for it.
I also liked the fact that the concept of multiple stationary cameras was introduced. It allows the movie to get away from everyone needing to lug cameras around all the time. (The character of Ali does seem fond of carrying a camera around, but only does so when the plot actually calls for it.) It also gives use the opportunity to capture events and get camera angles that wouldn't be possible otherwise, while averting that whole "why do they keep filming?!" problem that's long plagued the found footage genre.
Continuing on, I'm not sure if I should critique the writing. Scripts are really inconsequential in a lot of horror movies. But I will give Paranormal Activity 2 an A for effort in the writing department. Writers Michael R. Perry, Christopher Landon, and Tom Pabst actually make a decent go of it. The way they connected this haunting to the first movie's was a neat idea, but I'm still not sure if I liked their explanation for the demon's presence in the first place. I thought it was scarier when the demon was haunting them for the sake of being evil. The only thing that really scares me more than a reason is no reason. The good thing is, though, that the motive is explained in such a way that it could be written off as sheer conjecture by the characters. The demon could still be evil for evil's sake.
But to tell you the honest truth, any of the movie's flaws come from the script. I can't go too much into it without giving away a bunch of the movie (even though the plot synopsis did some of that already), but yeah, the script had a problem or two here or there. It's nothing that can't be totally overlooked, so the problems aren't as big as one might think they are.
The one weird thing about it that didn't really hit me until after the fact was the housekeeper character. What's with movies dealing with the supernatural having older ethnic characters that know everything turn up? At least she was more proactive in helping ward off the trouble than the demonologist from the first Paranormal Activity. Here, a light in the backyard flickers once, the baby starts crying, and she absolutely loses it. She starts waving incense around and saying prayers and incantations and we're barely twenty minutes into the movie, long before the really spooky stuff starts. This lady knows the score and the game hasn't even started yet. The family patriarch fires the poor housekeeper shortly thereafter, so I guess it she's just there to continue the horror movie trend of nobody listening to the prophet of doom.
I guess the only thing left for me to talk about is the cast. The actors aren't as memorable as Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat were in the first movie, but they all do just fine. Molly Ephraim is particularly likable and sweet, while Sprague Grayden is believable in her role. It's a shame, though, that Brian Boland's character is so unlikable. I mean, Sloat's character in the first movie was a tremendous douchebag, but he was still amusing. Boland's character is just a dick. But really, that's more of a complaint about how he's written than Boland's performance.
The funny part is that the family dog is the best actor in the movie. I don't want to sound like I'm disparaging the human actors, because I'm not. But the dog is actually a character you can sympathize with and root for, all because of how its scenes are handled and just how well the dog performs. I know I must sound crazy, but yeah, the dog was my favorite character, and whoever trained him should be applauded.
Is Paranormal Activity 2 better than its predecessor? I can't say for sure at this point. I'd probably have to sit down and watch both of them back to back to ultimately make that decision. But what I can tell you right now is that Paranormal Activity 2 is a damn scary movie in its own right. Whether or not you liked the original movie, the second one is a frightening flick no matter how you slice it. I just know that they'll make Paranormal Activity 3 after how successful this one's been at the box office so far, so here's hoping it won't be the one that sucks.
Final Rating: ****
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