Who doesn’t like a good movie about paranormal events?  Ok, well in this case who doesn’t like a movie about paranormal activity?  Our special guest Benjamin Essner, that’s who. (Oh, and me.)  So read on and see what he thought of Paranormal Activity 2!

I got a little emotional in my review of the first Paranormal Activity.  So I'll try to avoid that this time around.

My main problems with Paranormal Stupidity 2 are technical ones.  The majority of the action in this film is supposedly captured with home security cameras.  Security cameras that capture every detail of everything that happens in the house with perfect hi-def quality.  And no apparent auto-focus.  And they record sound too, in perfect, uncompressed, high fidelity Dolby 5.1 surround.  I'm not an expert in home security systems, but it seems to me that such a setup, if a comparable system even exists in real life, would be extremely expensive.  And even though the characters seem to be upper-middle-class, or lower-upper class, or somesuch, that expensive a system would put a HUGE dent in the family's budget.  I realize that you can't put a price tag on your family's safety, but even so, it seems like a much cheaper system could do the job.  And it also seems like they should have had a few cameras pointed toward the road next to the house, so if the theoretical person who broke into the house was parked nearby, they could maybe get a license plate number. 

My other main issue with the movie is how it ends up.  The father (a skeptic and possibly an atheist) fires the maid they have working for them for burning incense around the house trying to protect the baby from the demon, not believing that anything supernatural is happening.  Though he's kind of a jerk about it, at least he's not an idiot like Micah is in the first film.  Unlike Micah, he doesn't go around taunting the demon and bringing in things like Ouija boards that, if they actually do have some connection to the spirit world, are just as likely to exacerbate things as help them.  The problem is that when he finally does accept that there is something going on that he can't explain, the demon already has control of his wife, and because she has by this point tried to kidnap the baby and attack both him and his daughter, the only authority on the paranormal that he can think to call under the circumstances is the maid that he'd fired.  As opposed to, say, a priest or a minister or a rabbi or even Dan Aykroyd.  Well, when you go to someone who is not an ordained religious person or a licensed professional paranormal investigator and eliminator, you get what you pay for.

In this case, what he pays for is extremely bad advice on dealing with demons.  Basically, the maid claims that the only way they can rid themselves of the demon is to transfer it, via a religious object, to someone else, specifically a blood relative, even more specifically, the mom's sister Katie*.  Yes, the only way to rid yourself of the devil's minions is not through prayer, not through an exorcism performed by a religious authority.  The only way to get rid of a demon is to play a diabolical game of Hot Potato.  When Jesus and the Apostles cast out demons, they would cast them into pigs, not an innocent bystander whose only crimes are being related to the victim and dating an idiot whose name is spelled Micah, but is apparently pronounced "Meek-ah".

That's another thing about this movie, it uses the convention of there being only one possibility for anything.  According to the daughter's research on the internet, there is only one possible explanation for why this demon could be stalking her stepmother's family: because obviously one of her ancestors made a deal with the demon where the ancestor would get money or power in exchange for her first-born son, but she failed to produce a son as did her descendents, so the demon is just sticking around until someone in the family has a son so it can finally be paid for the deal.  I don't remember if the daughter actually says that is the only possible explanation, but she never gives any alternate explanations. 

Anyway, it's a very unrealistic movie, and the only scary thing about it is that it this series continues to be popular.

-Benjamin Essner

*aka the girl from the first movie.  This movie is a prequel to the first one, did I mention that?  I understand the third one is a prequel to this one, as well, set in the 80's and presumably recorded on VHS.  If the pattern continues, I suppose that means the next one will be a prequel set in the 70's, recorded on 8mm film, and the series will continue to go even further back in time on increasingly primitive means of conveying images, until the final movie in the series will consist entirely of a montage of pictures of cave paintings of cro-magnons fighting demons.