The funniest film since The Wicker Man remake!

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2010)

I am sitting here, gorging my own retinas out as my mind sits in total dismay and hilarious bewilderment. This glorified home-movie contains the supernatural ability to challenge the master that is Uwe Boll. I am of course, talking about the shaky, the dark, the grainy, the amateur, the one and only, Paranormal Activity.
Paranormal Activity is 'apparently' a horror movie; I'm not sure where the horror is located. Perhaps it's the comedic, 'Airplane (1980)' performances or the 'camera on a leash' duties that intended to terrifying the poor, unsettled victims out of their uncomfortable cinema seats.
The film attempts to recreate the classic television series, Most Haunted, by offering the viewer a smattering of obscured camera angles, lack of a tripod and lots of big-lipped and enlarged eyed expressions, all tinted with the trusty gamma-ray night-vision exposure that even the Incredible Hulk would cringe at. Unlike the wonderful and beautiful Most Haunted, Paranormal Activity attempts to harbour a plot that can be summed up as follows: Man buys a new video camera. Man and Girl investigate haunted house. Man follows girl around with camera. Lots of giggles and other mindless traits before we get to the real action - a bed. Yes, for about an hour, we are treated to more sleeping than a regular episode of Big Brother would show. It's as if the actors became bored of the unimaginative screenplay (was there even a screenplay?) and just conveniently fell asleep, to which the director shouted action and captured his cocooned actors in their hibernating periods...and occasionally opening a door or making loud noises to wake them up.
Before I drain my senses anymore, basically, the girl becomes possessed by this unexplained entity, kills her boyfriend by throwing him into the camera and then crawling up to the screen in her best 'Ring' impersonation. That's it. Not a lot happens. Fade to black. The end. They have our money. They have those 90 minutes that we can never claim back. I'm sure lots of pretentious 'arty' people will salvage this thin layer of botched film-making and attempt to rise up in its defence against my negative review, but Paranormal Activity represents almost everything wrong with cinema and film-hype (and Transformers 2, but that's another story, a story more terrifying than this).
This slew of picking up a camera and copying Cannibal Holocaust but forgetting the exploitation and hilarious nature of that 70's classic just shows how misunderstood film is, and how audiences haven't woken up to the realisation or even questioning what is delivered to them anymore. True, not every film needs to be intelligent or seminal (Commando, 1985, is a magnificent classic) but for the love of cinema, start waking up a little more. Paranormal Activity (or Paranormal INactivity) is a botched attempt at realism and even thought its cutting and pasting elements from every other known ghost film, instead of re-inventing those ideas, they are executed terribly from a director whose brain cell can't operate on a subtle and inventive level, instead gluing together creepy-crawly nasties as seen in other films. If the film-makers bothered to read a BOOK, then the film may have stood a chance at being a little more intelligent.
As it is, Paranormal INactivity is a poor student film, that is misguided, no sense of direction, no sense of format, no sense of style, it just has no sense. But as a comedy, oh crikey, it's a laugh riot. I'm laughing so hard, I've forgotten about those precious 90 minutes it took away from me. HAHAHAHA. Actually, no I haven't. I wish I could have claimed that golden timeframe back. I could've been doing something so much more constructive, like, watching a better movie....
0/10