Plenty of "Normal Activity" for a (home-)movie claiming to offer the paranormal.

Rating: Null/10 (25 February 2010)

People continually going upstairs downstairs is rather normal activity. People sleeping between midnight and morning I hear is quite common behavior too. Not to mention the exciting arguments over whether the movie's main camera should be recording the trivial proceedings or not. But I guess the movie's title must be referring to the inexplicable hence supernatural effect the movie had of people screaming in theaters as they watched it, their Neanderthal jaws dropping in horror. Only black magic can account for this turkey raking in as much dough as it did.
Just because a dozen or so little ol' ladies shrieked in horror while watching PA (they were probably given free tickets by the cunning producers) and then ran out of the theater gasping for air, doesn't mean that the rest of the audience were shaking in terror too. I refuse to believe all those idiotic hype-reports of people fainting while watching this 35-cent crap-o-rama. Or are today's audiences truly that stupid? Have years of viewing Nicholas Cage action flicks and Meryl Streep dramas so exhausted/drained the viewers's collective brains? What's next, a Summer blockbuster comedy filmed by pre-schoolers, which consists of 90 minutes of little boys hitting each other with their Transformers' toys? I don't want to know what historical dramas will look like in 5 years (Actually, they already stink; see "Alexander"...)
A bland yuppie and his chesty but plain-looking (and only slightly less annoying) girlfriend spend several weeks going up and down the stairs in their haunted house, while she berates him for trying to make a low-budget piece of crap horror flick for very easily scared viewers. In the meantime, an inept ghost – who probably failed all his Terrorizing the Living courses at Netherworld University – does all he can to frighten them. The fact that the plot makes it all the way to a "Night 18" caption sufficiently describes how well the spook had succeeded. You almost gotta feel sorry for the poor undead sap.
Why any demon - no matter how lonely, bored, or intellectually hollow he/she/it might be – would actually bother to spend several weeks with these knuckleheads, that's the real mystery here. The couple should have hired a demon-shrink, not a "demonologist" (an old f**t who leaves the house like a coward at first opportunity - a hilarious bit). After all, all a "demonologist" can really tell them is what they already know, i.e. that a semi-retarded, barely competent ghost had moved into the house to steal the guy's girlfriend (apparently spooks love big breasts too), but a demon-shrink, on the other hand, could have actually gotten to the bottom of this poor spirit's true mental problems. Perhaps he wasn't loved by his demon parents, or perhaps he just realized that the only way to stop this movie from going on forever is to kill its main protagonist slash director slash cameraman slash day-broker who says "dude" and "like" in most sentences slash unconvincing and dull moron slash Micah.
Most of the movie consists of the two birdbrains stating the obvious (pointlessly summarizing/commenting on what the viewer had seen just minutes earlier) and then going to bed to lie around while we watch the ghost's feeble attempts to assert himself as the star of the movie. So lousy are the demon's terror-less antics that he can't even get a highly strung woman to panic enough to actually physically leave the house. Instead, Katie starts feeling pity for the ghost, and eventually falls in love with him, allowing him to possess her rather chunky body (plenty of space there).
In the end, we get rewarded with the movie's one truly well-shot scene, the one with the hapless yuppie getting slammed into the camera (a Mikah death is a good death, regardless of the manner in which his torso gets hurled). But was that one good scene worth the 85 minutes of pure tedium and in-your-face proud-to-be-crap amateurism? Worse yet, this good scene is followed by Katie smirking into the camera and then assaulting it to eat it? Her figure does suggest a rather undiscriminating diet, so
There's a good reason why fantasy-based horror films only have a chance at being effective when they're STYLISH, i.e. when there is actual effort, talent and money involved. Movies about junkies or lower-class families screaming at each other are sometimes made in low-budget kitchen-sink mode, but that works for (riff-raff) dramas only. You can't expect me to get spooked by a moron with a hand-held camera who talks like a college meat-head, and a dilettante who plays his girlfriend with the conviction of an F-student reading his history report on George III.
Still, for whatever it's worth, "Paranormal Activity" it still scarier than "The Blair Witch Project". What I mean to say is that TBWP is "Bambi" to PA's "Fantasia".