Paranormal Activity

Maybe scary is like beauty; it is in the eye of the beholder.

Lots of people have said that the new movie, Paranormal Activity, is scary, like for real scary, like The Blair Witch Project scary.

Sorry but The Blair Witch Project was never all that scary to begin with, and Paranormal Activity, also shot in that cinema-verite style, isn't either. The movie is not even creepy, the kind of creepy that keeps you up at night in a darkened house or apartment, jumping at strange sounds.

Suffice it to say, I slept well after seeing this movie.

The movie, the one made for just $11,000 but topped the box office this weekend, is about a young couple, Katie and Micah, who hear weird things go bump in the night. It turns out that Katie has been haunted by some demon/ghost thing ever since she was little that followed her every place she has lived, including the nice little home she has made with Micah.

Micah decides to set up a camera in the bedroom to record what happens. He also follows his girlfriend around during the day with the camera. Oh, how romantic. Look at how cute she is when she's brushing her teeth.

The audience knows going in that the ending is not so bright for this young couple since we are looking at footage that police found after some horrible occurrence. We just have to slog through the movie to find out what that is.

The concept is cool. And the director, Oren Pi, does manage some legitimate chilly moments, but nothing that jolts you out of the seat until the very end.

Katie Featherston and Micah Stoat, the newby actors who play the couple, have an easy-going chemistry together that grounds the movie and avoids reality-TV cliche.

But despite Katie's well-rehearsed screams, the movie lacks suspense. I hardly cared what happened to the couple because I wasn't invested in them or their survival.

And while the ending (which like any good movie critic, I won't reveal) does provide a juicy climax, it comes too little, too late.

Like The Blair Witch Project, this movie feels like a gimmick, a well-executed one, that in the end amounts to bleh.