Sound familiar? While "Paranormal Activity 2", as a film, manages to stay on the safe side of being an atrocity, and remains watchable in that faux-voyeuristic way we've come to know from the rash of similar camcorder "found footage" movies, it does bring nothing new to the table, and perhaps terminally, opts to lean far too heavily on its predecessor.
The events of this film occur before and along side of those depicted in "Paranormal Activity", thus rendering PN2 a sort of prequel/counterpart. This time, the action centers on the family of the ill-fated PN1-heroine Katie's sister. There's an affable if irritable husband, his teenage daughter, a toddler, and a German shepherd in the mix. Early in the film, their home is vandalized; prompting the installation of a multi-camera security system all over the house, the footage of which serves for the filmmakers as default material in those inevitable moments when it is implausible that the characters priority would be rolling video on the Handycam. While this device serves to ease that irksome bit of necessity we've come to expect in camcorder/"found-footage" movies, I do have to wonder - do these kind of multi-camera home security systems also include directional microphones?
But I digress. Let's take a quick look back:
Last year's no-budget, out-of-nowhere independently made hit "Paranormal Activity" stands as one of the major film stories of 2009. Love it or hate it, filmmaker Oren Peli's subtle chiller was a welcome burst of adrenaline for the movie world at that time - the anti-"Avatar", if you will. It was painstakingly made in secret for about $12 with non-actors on weekends inside Peli's house. Once Hollywood caught wind of it, and realized that a polished remake was not necessary - it's plenty scary as is - they released the film under the auspices of a clever if questionable campaign, urging horror fans to "demand it"! They did, and boom, another version of The Great American Success Story. (Or so we're told.)
Naturally, there had to be a sequel. Quickly.
So here we are, one year later, with the inevitable "Paranormal Activity 2". Although Peli's part in the proceedings has been greatly diminished, the sequel opts to tie closely with the first film, assuming a level of recall of "Paranormal Activity" on the part of the viewer that many are simply unlikely to harbor. Personally, having seen the original film only once on DVD (an experience I enjoyed but did not obsess over), I did not immediately recognize the names and faces of that movie's cast as they began to pop up in PN2. This would be merely annoying, as opposed to the deal breaker that it is, if not for the fact that the climax of this film is more of a tacked-on postscript from "Paranormal Activity" - practically out of left field in relation to the eighty or so minutes of PN2 that preceded it.
In short, if you're going to see "Paranormal Activity 2", it's not a bad idea to brush up on the first "Paranormal Activity" beforehand.
But should you see "Paranormal Activity 2"? Is such a transparently crass, forced and by the numbers return to the well worthy of anyone's time and money? Well, looking at it purely as a horror story, and not as the piece of artificial gonzo cinema that it so clearly is, you could do worse in the way of spooky ghost movies than PN2. Yes, most of the scares are jump scares, and its over-reliance on professionally generated audio-based trickery (everything from loud THUMPS! to low-end rumble when things get creepy) betrays its "found footage" premise. If anything, director Tod Williams ("The Door in the Floor") errors to the side of mundane subtlety for most of the film, which tends to render some of its more would-be clever "paranormal" moments of revelation more unintentionally hokey than scary, simply due to the abrupt tonal shift. It certainly doesn't help that those moments tend to be of the head-scratching variety - for example, an automated pool cleaner leaping out of the pool on its own, caught on video. Sorry Paramount, the audience was snickering.
While the film itself wasn't great, it didn't, in my opinion, justify the sheer level of vile dismissiveness being heaped upon it at the screening I attended. What does justify that, however, is the transparency of it all. I'm talking about the overall "Paranormal Activity 2" experience.
By now we all know that this is fake. Actors and directors, screenplays and special effects - Fake. Perhaps some of us were fooled by "Blair Witch" in 1999 (not I, for the record, although, also for the record - thumbs up to it). Perhaps even "Paranormal Activity" fooled some again last year. But come on, with a sequel (prequel? "follow-up"?) so soon, so predictable, and like clockwork - audiences are basically being asked to pretend to buy into this well-oiled machine of a haunted "reality show" up on screen. Granted, the willing suspension of disbelief is a hallmark of all fictional storytelling, but in this case, it's all heightened by the directness of the aesthetic. Only now, the $12 budget of the original has been replaced with a more healthy and polished $1.2 million budget (I'm making up these numbers, for the record, just stay with me here), and Oren Peli's one-man show has been replaced with a Hollywood crew. (Stick around for the end credits, and wonder how all those people fit into that house on a daily basis.) Indeed, the cumulative effect of all of this makes the false reality of PN2 harder to believe than the notion that it's now in theaters because fans once again "demanded it".
This whole exercise amounts to more than just seeing a movie, and some are clearly resentful of the "work" that's being asked of them. Lazily retreading the original while also requiring it as recent homework should render PN2 a fly-by-night venture. But it will no doubt make money anyway, and I think it's safe to assume that around this time next year, we'll be talking about "Paranormal Activity 3". The ending of this entry and the casual attempt at establishing back-story all but ensure a follow-up. Indeed, it doesn't take a paranormal expert to predict that for the foreseeable future, no matter how loudly horror fans demand it; this particular haunted activity just won't go away.
- Jim Tudor