PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2009) ¢
D: Oren Peli
Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat,
Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer
The camera verité gimmick unleashed by "The Blair Witch Project" in 1999 always had limited potential, and with "Paranormal Activity", it's really run out of gas. This time, it's the story of Micah and Katie, a young couple living in a haunted house. (As it turns out, it's Katie who's haunted.) But Micah has a video camera, see, and he's obsessive about filming everything, so that's the point of view you've got through the whole movie. You don't get to know much about the characters, and as the picture goes on, you realize you don't really want to. It's not that Sloat and Featherston do a bad job playing them. It's that with no help at all from the script, and not much in the way of personality to distinguish them, Micah and Katie as characters are flat-out boring. You don't ever find out what's going on, either. Ghosts? Demons? Madness? The last few seconds are quite creepy, but by then it's a case of much too little, way too late.
