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Kieron's Review - Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

Paranormal Activity 2 As an expert on the horror genre… no. As a horror film enthusiast...not quite. As a horror film fan…yes that’ll do. I recently went on a rarity these days. I went to the cinema to watch Paranormal Activity 2 and was bitterly, bitterly under-whelmed. Maybe it’s because I, like many others have been exposed to the high levels of violence, gore and unusual events of recent times and therefore acquired somewhat of a shock immunity and increased resistance to film like this. Or maybe, it was mainly because the film wasn’t very good. There were some good points of the film although the swimming pool cleaner wasn’t quite enough to deter me from the shamble’s that made up the rest of this jump-out-of-your-seat thriller/horror. A few of the jump moments did catch me out rather well, especially during the end however I felt that the overly loud thudding sound effects coupled with the under climatic results from the mysterious events were an all too familiar trait of an unconvincing scary movie. For example, yes, having the pan drop from its hanger in the middle of the night at first caught out most in the cinema when it first happened, but then it was followed up every five minutes or so with something else dropping, with the occasional door opening on its own for no reason flung into the mix. Before long I was finding it an effort to actually hype myself up to become scared, shocked or even intrigued. Thankfully there were a couple of spots that got me, though not so much the timing element than the action that took place such as the when a possessed Katie lunged towards Daniel in a crazed vampire-ish fashion. In all I’d class PA2 as not being a terrible film of its genre and perhaps even an acceptable form of what it was, when you think of other examples of shock horror. I’d be surprised if on first watching this you don’t get caught off guard at least once, however most of the jump scenes are weak and easily predictable, the characters although I felt seemed realistic as a family being filmed, were dull and even annoying at times and as a film… well, it seemed much more like a low budget ghost hunting documentary although its arguable that the director may have intended on it looking somewhat similar to that. Film- 6/10 Scare Factor- 7/10