Lame, Lame, Lame

Rating: 3/10 (29 November 2009)

Horrors these days are increasingly all about the huckster sell; the fairground barker's vulpine cry. That's always been the way of course (see William Castle), but it has become more pronounced in the era where surface is depth. Rope the suckers in on a tide of hype; switch the lights on and off and few times; rattle those pots and pans. Count the money behind the tent. Don't give them the pleasure.
Which brings us to Paranormal Activity: AKA 'one of the least scariest movies ever made'. I dunno, there's a world of difference between reports of whipped-up, hyped-up crowds jumping out of their skins... and the more banal reality of the audience I attended this with tonight, yawning and sniggering throughout and peering round curiously in the dark to see if anyone else was finding this as lame as they were. (Typical post-credits moment: an elderly boho Chelsea - that's Chelsea, London - couple, who huffed stiffly out muttering, "I can't believe I paid good money too see that...). In fact, most people left the auditorium with a shrug.
Perhaps the whole camcorder horror thing's been done to death, has lost its potency. As if to counter this, the film really pulls out the stops in the final 5 minutes, in which a possessed girl is suddenly dragged around the room, Exorcist-style, and starts speaking with one of those multi-tracked 'demon voices' familiar from Buffy, Charmed and the like. Up to this point, there had been a vague ambiguity about proceedings - was this a genuine haunting, or have they been scaring themselves? That 'demon' voice is a really dumb decision that instantly renders the film even sillier and more redundant than it already is. Even the vastly overrated Blair Witch Project didn't stoop to those levels of crassness.
Seriously, if you want scary, see Robert Wise's original 1963 The Haunting; a film Paranormal Activity freely borrows from, with its clunks and clanks, but is infinitely more ingenious.