Jinkies!
Ever heard of Orin Peli? No you haven't, but day after tomorrow you will: According to Wikipedia, his tidy little night fright titled "Paranormal Activity" has already achieved a profit-to-cost ratio of 2,500:1, making it the most profitable independent movie in motion picture history, putting it among stellar company such as "The Blair Witch Project" and "Clerks".
Speaking of Blair Witch, stop me if you've heard this one: Young people with a video camera get lost, hear strange noises in the night, and get recorded scaring themselves out of their wits.
But instead of being lost in the Black Hills of Maryland, post-Yuppie couple Micah (Micah Sloat) & Katie (Katie Featherston) are lost in their own relationship, an "engagement to be engaged", and stuck with each other in a rather spacious and way clean two-storey tract house in San Diego.
So clean I'd like to have them visit and tidy for me if they'd leave the ghost at home.
And about that ghost...
Katie believes she's been haunted all her life since a house fire in her childhood, the damned spirits following her wherever she moves. Micah thinks this is all cooler-than-cool, and purchases a video camera and sets up computer apps to keep track of the nightly habits of whatever might appear in their bedroom. Yes, already their sex life is shot.
The movie then cleverly goes from daytime activity while Katie & Micah wonder What It All Means, interspersed with the nightly video, which is accelerated for us to the good bits.
And those good bits have reportedly caused audience members to leave the show before it's half over. Not because the movie is that bad. But because it tells its story too well. Deep rumblings at 3 a.m. like living above a ghost subway. Lights that turn on down the hall while the couple sleep. Swinging doors, ghostly sighs, dogs and cats living together!
Being dedicated to effective/not effective instead of the good/bad thing, this is a great way to begin, as "Paranormal Activity" is very effective. I've always lamented that horror and action films are glutted with cartoonish CGI, plastic-y looking monsters and the world constantly being blown up with comic book splash page gusto (more on Roland Emmerich's "2012" another day).
But first-time director Peli will have none of that. It's not about all the explosive digital gibberish you can see on the screen, so much as the open, dark doorway to the bedroom -- maybe even your bedroom -- where something might be there.
Yeah, you don't like that already, do you?
Little history lesson, though. If you've seen the 1963 "The Haunting," directed by Robert Wise, P.A. will seem a little familiar to you. Banging noises, invisible footsteps, whisperings down the hall, all are borrowed from the original haunted house flick.
And like "Haunting," P.A. also tells a story-within-the-story of relationships stressed to the breaking point, obsession, and having to live with a human being you thought you knew until they get up and stand by the bed staring at you for three hours on end.
Even the friendly psychic Mark Fredrichs (all actors using their real names) isn't a damn lick of good, bailing on the kids when things get hot. Too bad the Scooby Gang aren't available! They'd have Fredrichs in handcuffs by the final reel.
There's little more to it than that; just a creeping sense of dread and staring down the hall to all the empty rooms beyond. In an age of supercolliders, cloning, stem cells and science revealing the infinitely large and small, there's still a little life in the Things That Go Bump In The Night yet.
My Two Cents: Scary fun as long as you don't sleep in the only occupied room in a three-bedroom, two-storey house. Way too much room for bumpage & thumpage. Runs out of Scary Steam close to the end as the set-up is rather repetitious -- setup the video cam, wait till 3-4 a.m., see what bites (literally), repeat as necessary -- and the plot doesn't even give a fig about helping poor Micah or you in figuring things out. Dis spook iz wad id iz.
But slinging a video camera and a sense of verisimilitude to catch Blair Witches and Cloverfield aliens is here to stay.
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