Review: Paranormal Activity 2

So it's Halloween Day, I'm walking home from the mall (JC Penney has men's Nordic sweaters on sale for $29.99!), and I realize that I haven't seen a movie all week. Since it is Halloween, I'm thinking that a horror movie fits the bill, so as I'm passing by Cinebarre I check out my options. The first option is Saw 3D, which most likely involves a lot of bloodshed and torture (just like my job). The second option is Paranormal Activity 2, which I surmise has something to do with a haunted house, but since I didn't see PA1, I can't be sure. I decide against the torture and buy a ticket for PA2, but as it turns out, it was a fairly torturous experience.

It seems there's this nice white suburban family -- dad, mom, their new baby, and dad's teenage daughter from a previous marriage. They happen to be one of those families that insists on capturing every single moment of their lives with a camcorder, which is more or less "lucky" for us, because otherwise there'd be no movie. And then there are a lot of secondary characters like their German Sheperd, Abby (the only character I really cared about), their superstitious Latino maid, and the wife's sister and her boyfriend. Got that straight?

Anyway, strange things start happening around the house. The lights start flickering. The cable goes out. Cupboards and drawers are being left open and no one will take responsibility for it. Pretty shocking stuff, huh? Then one day the family comes home to find their clothes scattered all over the floor. (I got a big laugh out of that -- with most of my friends, the ghosts would have to put things away in order to be noticed.) The dad freaks out and decides to install security cameras all over the house. The maid tries to "drive out the bad spirits" by fogging up the house with this incense junk, which results in her immediate termination (although the dad does promise to give her a good reference).

Then the noises start -- loud ones, in the middle of the night. One of them startled me so bad, I almost threw my back out. Pots and pans fall off of their hooks in the kitchen. A bird flies into a window. The dad discovers that the little machine that cleans the pool has been wandering around under its own power in the middle of the night. And on and on ...

The mom is understandably on edge from all of this unexplained phenomena, so the dad decides that it's time for a date night and they leave the teenage daughter alone in the house with the baby (what could go wrong?). She invites her boyfriend over (naturally) and they break out the ouija board (don't most suburban families have one?) to find out if whoever is turning the lights off and on is trying to tell them something (like "conserve energy", maybe?). At this point I got a little nervous, because I don't particularly care for the occult, but it turns out that the boyfriend was only interested in spelling out dirty words on the board and their date goes downhill from there. He goes home and she falls asleep on the couch.

Then things really start to hit the fan. The daughter hears a loud banging on the door, but when she goes to investigate, the door slams shut behind her and she's locked out. The baby starts levitating out of his crib and up the side of the wall, but he seems to be enjoying it. The dog is thrown into a wall and knocked unconscious by an unseen force. (Again, the dog was the only character I really liked, so I didn't particularly care for that.) The parents come home and all hell breaks loose (literally). It turns out the mom and her sister used to "dabble in witchcraft" (like Christine O'Donnell) and she kind of forgot to tell her husband about this before she went off the pill. Yikes!

I won't spoil the ending for you, but I will say this: Paranormal Activity 2 had a few shocking moments, but as the movie went on, I realized I really wasn't having any fun. Now, I love a good horror movie as much as the next guy, and I have no problem with a movie that shows somebody chasing people around with a chainsaw as long as it's done right. But tone is everything, and other than the dog, I simply didn't care about any of the people in this movie. It left me empty.

Recommendation: Wait for Netflix or Redbox, if you choose to see it at all.