Domestic Hell beats Real Hell

Rating: 5/10 (23 October 2009)

By now you've probably been exposed to the hype surrounding Paranormal Activity, a low budget but critically lauded "mockumentary" horror film that chronicles the hunting's that plague a young American couple, and their attempts to capture the manifestations on video.
Instead of showing you key elements of the film, trailers have provided generous footage of audiences squirming in the seats and freaking out at the scares, all of which is true, yet deceiving.
Shot on the shoestring budget of $15,000 over the span of seven days by novice Director Oren Peli, the movie manages to alternate between predictable, boring, and creepy, with the latter being its only redeeming quality.
The story begins midstream, with couple Katie (Featherston) and Micah (Sloat) having been beset by periodic bouts of things that go bump in the night. It opens with Micah turning on a video camera he's just purchased to try and capture the going's-on on video. Think of Blair Witch meets suburbia and you'll get the idea.
They mount the camera on a tripod in the bedroom and set it to night vision mode and let it record each night's events for examination the next day.
It's during these evening recordings that the spirit becomes most frisky. Unfortunately, this is also one of the film's problems. In the interest of imparting a reality feel to the story, Peli devotes far too much screen time to the innocuous, boring and even irritating daytime banter between Katie and Micah, which is largely filler. We're told early on by a psychic that the entity feeds off "negative energy", which is inevitably followed by numerous scenes of the couple fighting as if Peli felt the scare factor would be upped by devoting 60 of the film's 86 minute running time to domestic hell.
The redeeming factor is in the film's night footage, which is far too short. Peli ably managed to give me goosebumps during the late night video segments, and a few when the couple were awakened as the hunting's were in full swing. While I'm compelled to admire his work in this area, its nothing that hasn't been done before, often to greater effect, in such movies as 1973's "The Legend of Hell House", or 2000's "The St. Francisville Experiment", both of which contain more story and similar frights, without the lousy camera work and constant bickering, which in this case may leave you feeling more sympathetic towards Beelzebub than Katie and Micah.