A few months back my dad attended the Tribeca Film Festival and watched the movie "Grave Encounters" which then started us off on the subject of horror movies. I'm not usually big on horror movies since they aren't usually as good as I hope for. That's not to say I don't like them, and I even compiled a list of my favorites for a previous blog post. Anyway, while my dad was telling me about Grave Encounters, the only thing I could think about were the two Paranormal Activity movies so I finally got Paranormal Activity 2 on Netflix dvd and today we sat down to watch both of them right after the other.
When I first saw them I was with a group of friends and we streamed the first one from Netflix onto someone's computer. That probably had something to do with the fact that I didn't find it the slightest bit terrifying. I also had the same problem with it, though, that I had with The Blair Witch Project; I constantly wanted to smack them over the head for being stupid so I didn't really mind that they were being haunted by a demon. Micah bothered me so often with his insistence on handling the 'ghost' problem all on his own. His line about it being his girlfriend so he'd take care of it just made me quite fine when the demon possesses Katie and kicks his ass. Only an idiot tries to get into a pissing contest with a supernatural demon over a girl. Secondly, I always have a problem when a demon or ghost or supernatural entitiy of any kind simply decides to haunt someone for no reason. I understand that wasn't meant to be part of the movie and probably was meant to make it scarier, but I just don't get why a demon would pick this Katie person out of all the 6 billion people in the world to mess with. I guess I just have a hard time caring about random people who obviously have never seen a scary movie in their lives and don't know the list of things NOT to do when dealing with a demon. The number one thing being DON'T GET A OUJI BOARD. Seriously, Micah, you deserved to be killed after bringing that thing into the house, especially after the girlfriend you cared about so much told you it was a bad idea.
On the flip side, I enjoyed the second movie so much more. Many of the problems that I had with the first one were solved, such as the demon suddenly had a reason to be haunting Katie and her family. Even some of Micah's stupidity was explained. After all, Katie's sister and family ran around with a camera talking about weird stuff happening, I can now see why he would think it would work for them as well. Overall I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first one. Also, I thought it was clever how they explained the burnt picture of Katie appearing in the house in the first movie. I didn't like the idea that the demon had been carrying it around in his little demon pockets for all those years.
On second viewing of both of them I stand by what I thought the first time, although I will admit that watching the first movie scared me a little bit more this time around. But then I was watching it on a normal size tv screen and I had all the explanations of the second movie to go on. Plus, it's somehow worse to watch them knowing that pretty much everyone you're watching on screen is either going to die or disappear. That was part of the appeal of the second movie for me. The entire time you're watching it going "well damn, Katie is totally screwed and so is Micah."
It was fun to watch them both again, especially being a little more creeped out by both this time around. After all, what fun is it to watch a scary movie that doesn't scare you? Now to watch some Doctor Who or White Collar so that I can safely go to sleep tonight.
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| Katie and Micah in 'happier times' |
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