Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Very Normal No Activity

The hype (the scariest movie of ALL TIME!!!!) is crazy, and since I get free movies, I was able to travel and see it when it was still in limited release.

I guess first let me say that the movie was shot in some guy's house and it cost only $11,000 to make (the re-shot of the ending cost an additional $4,000). With that in mind...this will be a free flowing discussion of the movie "Paranormal Activity" and spoilers may (and most likely will) be mentioned.




Right off the bat my interest was peaked. The last time I had seen a marketing campaign like this was when the first Final Destination came out (they showed the audience reaction jumping at a scene, which was the girl getting hit by the bus). So I figured it might be a good movie. However, just before seeing it I was told that it was a whole lot of waiting for nothing to happen. So going in, I was already negative, which means that the movie would have to work twice as hard to make it rate a zero on my scale.

Not only did it fail, it didn't even move me at all, (well, it did get one or two points, but I'll get to that in a moment) in the positive direction.

As a little research turned out, there really was no "script" just a general direction from the director so most of the movie was "dialog-improv" which actually made the two characters...believable. They also hit upon something that one always wonders about..."if the place is haunted why not get the hell out of there?". Well, it's the girl not the house, so it doesn't matter where they go. That and the re-shot ending (and maybe one or two short scenes before that) were the only scary (I wouldn't even go that far...maybe creepy) part of the entire movie. So in short, (almost) NOTHING HAPPENS until the ending and even that was too short. Think Blair Witch in a house, but less stuff happens....Quarantine was sooo much better..

No comments: