Terribly disappointing movie, not scary, Blair Witch lite at best

Rating: 4/10 (23 October 2009)

I was very disappointed with this movie.
One of the big problems with this movie is that it fails to build tension. Part of the issue is that the camera is stationary for the majority of the movie -- part of what made Blair Witch so nerve wracking was the constant movement. You are constantly waiting for things to happen in Paranormal Activity instead of being assaulted by images, so by the time something actually happens it can in no way live up to the anticipation in your mind -- scene after scene the scares fell completely flat for me. I'm not one of Blair Witch projects biggest fans, but it was far scarier as a film then this film.
Furthermore, there are a lot of problems with the writing of the film. The acting is good, but the characterization is bad. The boyfriends' obsession with filming each and every event goes too far out of the realm of believability after some of the more severe events in the film occur. The movie also was annoying expository -- the characters never really engage as real people would in a situation like this and thus it seems as if they are performing all of this for the benefit of an audience. Blair Witch found a way to feel authentic but this seems terribly put on, a similar feeling I got from Cloverfied, which possess some of the same annoying traits.
The writing actually introduces a few ideas that would have made the film more interesting -- they allude to the idea that perhaps SHE is the demon right from the start and that instead of the ghost following her around from house to house (which is opposite of the standard rule in ghost films) that she is actually the demon and is in turn haunting him. This might explain how a picture of hers might end up in the crawlspace. This of course would have been an interesting twist, but the movie never develops it and instead suggests that it is more of standard possession, with her being taken over by an entity. It also fails to deliver on several other loose plot-lines, such as the story about the woman who experienced the same types of disturbances, along with the demonoligist, instead of fleshing these out they just abruptly cut back to more of the same shadows on the door, noises in the hall, footprints in the powder show. It gets very tedious after about 35 minutes.
The ending bugged me a lot as well. In a movie that resisted using any kind of obvious CGI, they clearly jazz up the ending with some computer assistance and cheapen the whole film in the process. The ending of the film is especially reminiscent of Blair Witch, with almost the same sequence of events (woman screams, man screams, silence, camera gets knocked over into a from-the-floor askew shot). Blair Witch was at least brave enough to never reveal the woman at the end of the film, where this film throws in the demon face and reduces itself to a standard run of the mill zombie flick.
I just found the whole thing to be a huge waste of time and not scary at all. It probably didn't help that nobody in the theater aside from a couple of 17 year old girls shrieking occasionally in the back row seemed very involved with it either. I'm impressed with the movie they made for $40,000 or whatever this movie cost, but the rave reviews seem completely unjustified in light of the rather paint-by-the-numbers film-making.