lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin: USA

Rat­ings: **yawn**

Notes: Put sim­ply, this film is an insult to my intel­li­gence. It is a god­damn trav­esty how peo­ple are buy­ing into the hype of this film. As I type this, this movie is the 2nd biggest earn­ing film in the­aters. I didn’t see it in the the­aters and as I sat in a liv­ing room with grown peo­ple who were some­how hyp­no­tized into fright when a door swung back and forth and some thump­ing noises came out of the TV speaker, I was con­vinced that they would not have reacted that way if they didn’t imbibe all of the bull­shit adver­tis­ing that is sell­ing this flick as one the scari­est films of the decade.

It’s cool when a movie costs $85k and impresses you with lean pro­duc­tion val­ues (a la Evil Dead), but when a movie costs 15 grand and LOOKS like it costs 200 dol­lars, there’s some­thing wrong. Amer­i­cans are being duped into think­ing this film is the scari­est thing since Swine Flu and, I don’t get it at all. I don’t know who these fools are, but there noth­ing– repeat, NOTHING– that is going to con­vince me that A) a door or some sheets mov­ing by them­selves while being filmed in infrared equates to being the scari­est film of the decade and B) any film in which I have to watch peo­ple get ready for bed and brush their teeth more than three times whilst get­ting into awk­ward rela­tion­ship quar­rels is worth my $6 for a ticket. There is no art in this film, its like being invited over to someone’s house to watch them fight about what they want to have for din­ner and there just hap­pens to be a ghost there too. This is exploita­tion of the lamest kind: a 2 hour episode of Ghost Hunters with the usual team of clunky High School drop-outs replaced with Ross and Rachel from Friends. I am not exaggerating.

Early this month, I have said that I’m not so into “haunted house” movies because it seems like there is always that option of mov­ing the fuck away from said haunted loca­tion and get­ting on with your oth­er­wise unhaunted life. Early on, how­ever, the film quells that notion by hav­ing a rep­utable expert (a psy­chic) tell Katie that the demon which has taunted her since her child­hood will likely fol­low her if she were to leave the house. This psy­chic really doesn’t do any­thing for Katie and Micah but tell them how fucked they are and then leave. Ok, so, Katie can’t leave, but Micah could and it seems like great deal of the plot of the film is based around the “neg­a­tive ener­gies” cre­ated by the couple’s bick­er­ing. The psy­chic even says as much and for some rea­son Katie never brings this up again. The demon might fol­low her but at least she’d be away from the bad vibes cre­ated by her douchebag beau. I don’t under­stand why Katie and Micah seemed so con­tent to move in together in the first place when, in addi­tion to being pos­sessed by demons, Katie is clearly high-maintenance and bat­shit crazy and Micah is your typ­i­cal Dane Cook wor­ship­ing, self-absorbed douchebag.

Not to kick a cou­ple of dead horses that will rise from the grave and haunt Billy Crys­tal and Bruno Kirby in the upcom­ing City Slick­ers 3 (just kid­ding), but the last month on hor­ror film watch­ing has proven to me that good hor­ror hinges on a con­nec­tion to the char­ac­ters and these two char­ac­ters are plain annoy­ing and obnox­ious.. which really is fine. Every sin­gle vic­tim in Fri­day The 13th is obnox­ious and ter­ri­ble and we love that because we take joy in see­ing Jason dis­patch them. That whiny wheel­chair kid in Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre is so annoy­ing that you don’t even feel bad for his dis­abil­ity. Still, this dynamic of being made to hate a lead char­ac­ter so you may enjoy their immi­nent death is kind of a cheap and crass way of bypass­ing the need for qual­ity act­ing and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and cut­ting right to the exploita­tion. it’s cheap and shabby, but it works. The prob­lem with Para­nor­mal Activ­ity is that we never actu­ally see the antag­o­nist. Truth­fully, we never get to see any­thing at all. We see a door move, a sheet blow up, and (at the very best) we see Katie dragged out of bed by an unseen forced. Not “unseen” like that intense part of Night­mare on Elm St. where the girl flies into the air and slams into the ceil­ing and bleeds every­where, “unseen” like the way my brother-in-law ties strings to the door to slam them from across the room in order scare our cousins when they are glued to a hor­ror movie in the dark. With­out lit­tle doubt, he could have made this movie.

The peo­ple who made this film have no respect for their audi­ence. Crit­ics are laud­ing how cheaply made the film was, Sure, hor­ror is one of the few gen­res that can be very cheap and still be super effec­tive and some its best spec­i­mens are extremely low bud­get films that grossed mil­lions. But this isn’t John Car­pen­ter cheap– fuck this isn’t even Ed Wood cheap– this film is just irre­deemably cheap. I want to take back all of the bad things I’ve said about Michael Bay after hav­ing seen this, because Bay really thinks explo­sions and loud sound effects are what peo­ple want to see. His movies are a com­plete cacoph­ony but at least he’s put THAT much thought into a dun­der­headed movie in order to exploit a pop­u­lar toy from the 1980’s. Oren Peli needs to be pun­ished for mak­ing this film, because he’s just exploit­ing simple-minded, super­sti­tious Amer­i­cans who will buy into any and all hype and believe any­thing if it is shot in “night-vision green.”

Accord­ing the imdb.com this film was con­ceived because he had a box of deter­gent fall off a shelf– AND THERE WAS NOBODY THERE.