Deon Barnard

So… saw Paranormal activity last night, and to put it mildly, it was a load of crap – not to mention a load of woooo.

Several friends I have a fairly high opinion of told me this was a movie worth watching and definitely among the scariest movies they had ever seen. My experience was quite the opposite. I found it dull, predictable and frustratingly obvious and inadequate in its scare strategy.

I can understand how religious, superstitious and credulous people could be taken in by this fragile deception, (I guess I’ll have to admit later that this does include 80% of everyone alive), but I can’t see how any rational, skeptical, thinking person could do anything but laugh at the silliness of the whole thing.

Let’s break the nonsense into a few bite sized chunks…

1. The “I deal in Ghosts (Dead People) not Demons (Malevolent Spirits)” expert would have had me spitting out my tea and rolling on the floor laughing. Then on top of it all he has a friend who specializes in “demonology” who is unfortunately out of town. I could write for hours on the delusion of people who call themselves experts on subjects that have no basis in fact or evidence. Woomeisters don’t impress me at all.
2. Isn’t it convenient that one of the couple always had the video camera in hand. So let me get this straight – if you heard growling in your passage and saw things moving around the house… in fact your girlfriend is being thrown about by an invisible force – the first thing you’d do is go get the camera and film the event?! This aspect of the movie irritated me the whole way through it.
3. Let’s not forget our friendly neighborhood “Demon”, (supposedly a “malevolent spirit”), whatever that is. Let’s assume for a minute that a “spirit” was real and made from stuff not even similar to electrons, protons or neutrons. Suppose such a thing is completely intangible and undetectable by any scientific means, which is what all the woooo experts will tell you (because there is simply no evidence for these things); then how is it that such a thing could interact with our molecules and throw us around; not to mention all the other questions this raises like: How did they come to be? Why would they make ‘footsteps’ (or any sound at all)? Why would they ‘look’ like us, with arms and legs – or have goat hooves? Why would they care to open doors a little or move chandeliers? Believing in demons is about as stupid as believing in flying spaghetti monsters, gods or unicorns.
4. If this demon really was as “malevolent” as it turned out to be in the last scene, then why wait till the last scene? Why not just kill the guy in broad daylight on his first date with the demon possessed girl? I almost guessed perfectly what would happen on each new night time recording. It was entirely predictable.
5. Of course the main scare technique employed in the movie is the illusion that the viewer is watching a “home video” and therefore a piece of “real life” or at the very least a Hollywood portrayal of a “real life” event. If of course you believe this, then the movie will certainly frighten you, because you think all the insane nonsense that takes place in it has happened to real people somewhere – and was even captured on video. You may even think it was some sort of documentary. If you believe this, you probably also believe that the illuminati rule the world and the attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by the US government. Knock yourself out.

I have seen scary movies, and this was not one of them. This was practically comedy. It may have been a lot scarier if the “demon” was consistent and seriously malevolent from the beginning. It may have been more believable if the woman didn’t go upstairs to brush her teeth shortly after being attacked by a demon in the same space. It may have been more interesting if they actually filmed the wow sex they had instead of hours of people sleeping.

Movies that scare me have to do with what humans can do when they are deluded – movies like: “Population 436″, “Saw” and “Seven” among others.

What are your scariest movies?

Tags: activity, actor, demon, ghost, haunt, horror, movie, paranormal, possession, scary, scream, woooo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 20:42 and is filed under movies & music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.