Release Date – 10/22/10
Home video footage is shown of Kristi and Daniel bringing home their newborn son, Hunter. Also, Daniel’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ali, lives with them and films a lot of the footage. A few months go by and there’s a break-in while the family is out so for protection Daniel installs security cameras throughout the house. The cameras start catching some odd occurrences usually happening at night. When Katie & Micah from the original movie show up, we find out we are seeing events that took place before the happenings in the original movie. Kristi is Katie’s sister and they start to remember similar spooky things when they were younger. The movie is pretty much more of the same just with added cameras. It doesn’t really get into HOLY SHIT territory until the final 20 minutes. It was pretty unnecessary but provided a tiny bit of back story to the original movie. It’s a shame the back story wasn’t really needed.
Once again to make a more realistic feel to the movie, relatively unknown actors are used. Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat reprise their roles but in limited capacity. The real story is about Kristi (Sprague Grayden), Daniel (Brian Boland) and Ali (Molly Ephraim). Their world is rocked when cabinets and doors start slamming shut, lights are turning on and off and loud noises are keeping them up at night. They mainly fear for their young son who might be a possible target and a lot of the footage is shown from his bedroom. Where the original movie mainly focused on Katie & Micah’s bedroom, this movie has cameras all over the house to make a bigger “set”. Ali plays the curious young teen who starts researching demons and ghosts but her father doesn’t want to speak of anything so ridiculous. Kristi is the one who is noticing most of the odd things at the house and starts to side with her step daughter on the fact that something supernatural is present. The creepiness isn’t really set into high gear until later in the film which was disappointing. They try to lay out a background that explains why this demon would be haunting this family in the first place.
I think that part of the story is where the film fails. Paranormal Activity did not need a background story. The realism of finding a tape with the original film’s events is what made it scary in the first place. A movie like Cloverfield doesn’t need a back story. We don’t need to know where the monster came from just like in this we didn’t need to know where the demon came from. But without that background plot point, the movie is basically just a remake of the original. It could have come out in 10 years and just called itself a remake. Were there still scenes that make you jump? Yes, definitely. It’s still pretty creepy and scarier than your average new horror movie but it was just more of the same from the previous flick. And the characters were stupid enough to get a security system and barely even check the tapes when something happened. So many things could have been easily solved and avoided if they watched the tapes every night. Tod Williams is usually an indie director and I think he failed in taking over the helm for Oren Peli on a big sequel release. Paranormal 2 definitely does not compare to its predecessor in scares or originality. The final 20 minutes do not make up for a generally boring and unneeded setup.
IMDB – 6.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes – 67%
Movie Wiseguys – 5.5/10
