You won’t lose any sleep over it but it is worth a jolt or two and that might be enough for a night out. Paranormal Activity 2 makes some additions in effort to stand out from the original but it is also a bit of a recycler, it is still entertaining but too eager to scare. The higher budget sequel still employs the grainy home video and scratchy audio, and in addition to the family video camcorder, it has multi-prop surveillance video hovering over the premises. But it also wants to bring the house down with bigger effects – did a cyclone come and thrash the house apart? In this brand new household occupied by a married couple with a teen daughter and a toddler son, the unseen poltergeists are back. They are a prototypical American family of chatterboxes except for Hunter, the toddler.
The original was, in my book, one of the all-time great horrors, and it kept me up for several nights. Occasionally I experienced drowsy night tremors and thought I was seeing shadows moving in the dark. It messed with my head and I was surprised by fears that I hadn’t known were fears to me. Technically, the 2009 original benefitted from having the annoying Micah, who if anything, taunted the supernatural. The effects then were subtle, and all the more disquieting, until in one big swoop (maybe two, three) it sprang stupendous that-didn’t-just-happen and “Hell no!” wave of shocks.
The sequel has too many off in the distance bangs and clangs audio effects. It’s like the filmmakers are aware to not shock the audience too early, but they are also too conceding by giving us too much a taste of the pudding. During the “Night” titles the cameras crosscut between different angles chosen by the force of the director Tod Williams (no involvement with the first film). In “Night 3,” and “4” and “7” and on and on, the editing skips to one next shot after another, and we hear bumps and clanks (sometimes bashes) on the audio. We could see where the sounds were coming from if the director just stayed on the shot where the audio source occurred (the original benefitted from only one camera). This is manipulative to not bridge the audio and visual aspects together. As the story progresses though, there is more of a liberal willingness to show you what is happening, like direct information.
This haunted family seems to pick up the home camcorder for just about everything, hey, it must be what they do. Daniel (Brian Boland) is the father, both congenial and disagreeable to the ideas of spirits and metaphysics. Kristi (Sprague Grayden) is the sprightly wife who is full of good humor but professes that spirits are not anything to joke about. Ali (Molly Ephraim) is the teenage daughter who is the first to use playback tape as paranormal evidence. Hunter is the toddler, restricted at night in his crib, who stares at unseen apparitions on the other side of windows and mirrors. The house dog, sleepy one minute but ready to pounce when the unknown encroaches, is the most captivating character besides… Hunter.
When the camcorder is not rolling, the action and inaction is captured by surveillance cameras rigged with time codes. Theses high ceiling fixed cameras, peering down with their wide angle lenses, are effective. On the big screen, the audience’s eyes bounce back and forth looking for house objects to move scantly or to spring up in our eyes within the grainy blue nightscape of the visuals. At its tricky best, we wonder if we see something or if we merely see a blur that we thought was something.
We wait and wait to see something in each shot until we realize that the director doesn’t want us to see something in every shot. “How about it, already?” the audience might ask. But really, it would have been a stronger horror film if the filmmakers had waited a bit more. And taken excess sounds off of the audio track (the supernatural is too obvious making noises). The terrifying activity in the basement, when the film finally goes down there, has us engrossed with our eyes wide open and yet the peak result is damn confusing. One moment is terrific: Is that Hunter hanging upside down or is it merely the camera that is upside down?
To not appear like a cash-in byproduct, the sequel finds a neat-o if hambone way to intersect the events of the first film into this one. That’s one whiplash shock… to see Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone make appearances (one of them is relative to Hunter’s family). They are happy, pre-disturbed visitors that just come over to hang out, but they are also there so the studio marketing team can cross its T’s and dot its I’s for future DVD packaging. But you might be here not to hear about graces of storytelling but to know whether or not you will have a body shuddering experience. Well, you might get rattled nerves but you won’t quite flip out and go through sleepless nights by this sequel.
Go to the official site at http://www.paranormalmovie.com/
Grade: B
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