Oh, the travails of a movie page! In some weeks, there are two or three movies that could make a lead review, whether Movie of the Week or Not.
Yet it’s often in those same weeks, naturally, that we get an ad on the page, further reducing the available space for the longish, thinky reviews I like to write and hope Mail & Guardian readers like to read. But then there are weeks in which there’s a dearth of reviewables.
Sometimes there are weeks in which the unfortunate critic can barely contemplate even seeing the movies being previewed, let alone contriving an opinion on any of them. This week is one such.
I didn’t see the first two Millennium-trilogy instalments, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, so I wouldn’t really have been able to review part three, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
The third Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I’d sort of like to see — but certainly not in the form of that migraine called 3D. So that’s out.
The other option would have been the Afrikaans comedy, Stoute Boudjies, but having suffered through Poena is Koning I can’t see that it would offer much beyond mild nausea. The very words “Afrikaans comedy” strike fear into the breast — or is it the peristaltic system?
Paranormal Activity II
Hence, I’m afraid, Paranormal Activity II must receive what little attention this critic is able to give it, and Paranormal Activity II must take up the space allocated for the lead review, though I daresay that to tag it “Not the Movie of the Week” is an understatement.
How the first Paranormal Activity made so much money that it got a sequel I don’t know. Yes, the teen market goes to a lot of movies without much forethought, let alone reading of reviews, and that market supports any amount of crappy comedy and horror.
Or perhaps it was just the fact that the initial budget for Paranormal Activity was so low that it was bound to generate a profit; making movies as if they were being filmed by the protagonists is, as The Blair Witch Project showed, a way to cut costs drastically as well as — if successful — add a dimension in which the viewer may feel more involved in the storyline than if the movie was in a more conventional format.
Or so the thinking goes, I imagine. Paranormal Activity did the Blair Witch thing, but set the story in a house occupied by a young couple. In an update of the hoary haunted-house narrative, this pair encounters evil spirits who make things go bump, crash, tinkle — thus puzzling and terrifying the inhabitants of this rather sterile suburban residence.
In Paranormal Activity II, we have a more extensive and salubrious suburban home, into which a family of four (plus dog) is just moving. If only they knew!
If only they’d seen the first Paranormal Activity! But of course all the characters in the first movie are dead or have disappeared, so this is a new cast altogether and a new house.
I expected at various points in the film to be informed that this house had inadvertently been built on top of an old American Indian burial ground.
As it happens, there’s no need of burial grounds and so forth, because the relevant evil force is only vaguely defined — and all the necessary mumbo-jumbo to do with this idea, as the characters haltingly discover, can be found on the internet.
It’s a tricky balance, really: presumably the vagueness of the evil force is a way of letting the viewer’s imagination fill in the gaps (and not spending money on expensive special effects), which is sometimes more scary than showing the actual entity. But that has to be balanced against the need to supply some basic information to the viewer, as well as to the characters in the movie (our proxies in this regard), who naturally google all the evil under the sun and tinker with Ouija boards to try to find out what’s going on.
This may be mildly spooky for anyone unfamiliar with this kind of tosh, but it would help if one gave a damn about these dull Americans, which one doesn’t.
The most interesting character in the movie, with the possible exception of the pool-cleaning machine, is the dog.