Twenty-minute story; eighty-minute movie.

Rating: 2/10 (4 May 2010)

Remember those old 'portmanteau' movies, where you got a mixed bag of three or four stories? Imagine someone extracted a fair-to-middling twenty-five minute segment from one of those, padded it out with filler scenes and bloated it up into eighty minutes. Alternately, 'Paranormal Activity' resembles the product of the sixth best short story in an anthology made into a full-length movie. It's just too puny a story to carry the weight, and the movie is far too slight as a result. 'Paranormal Activity' comes across very much as a 'Blair Witch' wanna-be, although it misses entirely that movie's engaging mythos and 'ghost story' quality. The ending of 'PA' was actually pretty bad (I was left wondering where the rest of the movie was), but rest assured that the alternate ending (included in the 'Extras') is way worse. This movie would have only gotten one star were it not for the bits where the girl gets out of bed and stands still for hours. Those were about the only bits which really worked. Oh, and the girl was very cute, too.