Rated R mostly for being all spooky pookie.  But not a lot happens that is necessarily gory or vulgar.  Instead, we have a liberal use of the f-bomb, which makes me want to question whether or not that this movie could have been PG-13, despite being kind of upsetting.  Sure, they decided to embrace the f-bomb because this was meant to do the thing that The Blair Witch Project did and present itself as a documentary instead of a found footage film.  Still, not that much gory stuff happens here.

DIRECTOR:  Oren Peli

It's finally spooky season for me.  I know.  Some people start spooky season in September.  I can't do that much horror.  It makes me numb to it.  But I do want to knock out at least one franchise during spooky season.  So I decided to revisit Paranormal Activity.  

I know.  I know!  Guys!  You don't have to tell me.  I watched a lot of these movies back in the day hoping that they were going to screw me up pretty bad.  I don't know why I was rooting for that.  I suppose that I'm always chasing the thing that is going to rewire my brain.  And I don't think I'm alone in saying that the Paranormal Activity movies are a bit too overhyped.  I watched all the way, but not including, The Marked Ones in hopes that I was going to find a gem in this series.  But I remember that one of the first dates that I took my wife on (Again, apologies to my wife) was to watch this movie in the theaters.  I heard so much chatter about this movie that I thought that it was going to be one of those experiences.  When we left, ultimately disappointed, boy, did I have egg on my face.  I don't know why I kept reapplying that egg for my face another three times, but I did!  

But now I'm going into this franchise a little differently.  The thing about Paranormal Activity is that it was always in the shadow of its own hype.  We were always promised to see something that was going to scare the living daylights out of us and that kind of never happened.  Sure, we tended to get something mildly engaging towards the end of act III in these movies.  But in terms of actually writing home about something, that never really happened.  So my theory now is to say "Now that I've tempered expectations, are these things watchable?"  And I'm going to say, at least based on the first movie, "Maybe?"  I have to confess to another crime before I go too deep into this blog.  I watched this on a phone.  David Lynch is rolling over in his grave, but I watched it on my phone.  There are seven of these movies.  I want to watch them all throughout October and it's already the 5th.  I'm also planning on watching other horror movies this month between entries, so I don't want to be watching these until Christmas.  So I watch when I can!  Also, it's not like I'm dealing with top notch cinema.  This is a movie that I've already seen and it's found footage.  We're good.  

Tempered expectations definitely help.  It's actually kind of funny that I remembered so many story beats in a movie that almost actively does nothing throughout the film.  The biggest frustration that I had with the franchise before was the notion that so little happens in these movies.  It's about setting up atmosphere and playing with the notion of verisimilitude.  There's a lot of buy-in to the Paranormal Activity movies.  One of the issues I've always had with found footage is the notion that we have to believe that someone is always concerned with videotaping everything.  I'm not saying its impossible.  If anything, the invention of the GoPro might be one of my favorite plausible elements when it comes to these stories.  But from a narrative perspective, there is a lot of "Get to the good part."  Hitchcock said that it wasn't in the firing of the gun; it's the anticipation of the shot.  Paranormal Activity movies kind of push that to almost an irresponsible level.  So little happens in these movies as the entity slowly messes with small things.  

So here's me being gracious.  There is a temptation to ride the high horse of "This crap doesn't scare me."  For the most part, that's true.  There are times where it gets a little anxiety inducing.  But the reality of it is that I can see how this movie can be terrifying to the right crowd.  If anything, I'm a little jealous of the fact that people are okay with a movie being painfully slow.  I've always advocated that slow isn't necessarily a bad thing when it came to storytelling.  And I can't absolutely lie.  The tension does work to a certain point.  But I kind of feel like we need...more.  There's always the absence of what could be.  Part of that probably lies in the format of the found footage movie, with the dubious claim that we're seeing something real.  Reality doesn't necessarily throw up a ton of unasked for information.  But the thing that makes us scared is the notion that our imagination is better than anything we can see on screen. There is something incredibly anticlimactic to that.  If my brain is putting together horror stories that make me want to weep, I at least want an element of that confirmed in what I'm physically watching.  We never really get that kind of stuff.  I mean, I remember back in the day watching this movie and watching Katie's leg being pulled out of the bed.  That was pretty cool. But that moment was the child of the communion of an audience.  Watching that alone, it lacked the umph that many other movies kind of give me.

But there is something that I discovered once I stopped being scared.  If Paranormal Activity gives me anything, it kind of gives me a great movie about toxic masculinity and commentary on influencer culture.  This is a movie from 2007.  Micah's camera is giant.  He's not holding an iPhone. He's got a whole rig going.  This is pre-TikTok (as far as I know) and the notion of people being professional influencers is probably in its nascency.  As a conceit, I mentioned that the camera needs to go everywhere.  It's the issue that I have with first person narrators, especially if they are the ones not pushing the plot forward, like with Nick Carraway and The Great Gatsby.  This is Katie and the demon's story.  (By the way, round of applause whoever thought to make this is a story about Katie's entire life.  It makes it far more interesting than simply about scares.  We have a bible and a concept to explore with a character who seems used to the misery that her life is.)   Micah is there as the camera.  As such, the camera gains a personality.  It would be absurd that, as the story got darker and darker, that Katie would be the one pushing for the camera to continue to get involved.  That means that Micah has to be a complete butthead.  

Okay, there's probably a narrative where Micah is trying to get help for Katie.  But from this perspective, we can tell that he's sabotaging anything that would actually help Katie be free of the demon.  From a drama perspective, we have to watch Micah making bad choice after bad choice, giving the camera character a personality.  We have to remember that Micah is invading this space and actively making things worse.  If you don't care about scares, which I didn't really care about in this viewing, it becomes about how passive Katie becomes when a toxic force weaves into her life.  Yeah, I know that Katie gains agency as the story progresses and we learn more about Katie's backstory.  But that final image, where Katie is ripping into Micah, becomes oddly cathartic because we know that all of this escalated because Micah refused to take Katie's well-being into account.

So as a story --weirdly enough --I kind of like Paranormal Activity.  Yeah, it's really gimmicky and I often don't think that the gimmicks work in the way that the filmmakers want me to.  I wish it scared me as much as I wanted it to.  But from a lore perspective, the first movie does a solid job to make me peel back more stuff.  In a world where I get bored of V/H/S/  movies, this entry into a long running franchise does what it needs to do, but no more.

Rated PG-13 for scary stuff.  Like, the movie doesn't get overly scary.  I get the PG-13 line in the sand.  There are maybe one or two moments that are actually genuinely frightening.  If you are afraid of squid people or things that are kind of Lovecraftian, there might be some terror.  Most of the movie builds more on discomfort than on actual jump scares.  There is some drug use and some language in the movie.  This is more existential dread than anything visibly upsetting.  But there is some death in the movie, so take that into consideration.

DIRECTOR:  Louis Leterrier

So Hand Foot and Mouth is a bear when you are an adult.  See, a lot of the movies that I watch are on the treadmill.  (Aging, apparently, is also a bear.)  But when your feet are covered in sores (you're welcome, readers), it's hard to find time to watch movies like you used to.  So I just shotgunned The Last House, a movie entirely brought to me by gimmicky ad campaign.  Apparently, in Los Angeles, there was a billboard shaped like a house.  Inside of that billboard house, there was  a guy living in it.  Yeah, that was enough to get me to watch this movie.  Congrats, PR department, your gimmick worked.

Now, The Last House falls into a specific subgenre that I tend to like.  I don't want to name this genre, but these are high concept horror movies where the monster isn't easily seen.  (Well, in two of these cases, until the monsters are seen.) There tends to be a promise in these movies of a mystery that should have this great explanation.  In the cases of Bird Box or A Quiet Place, we have to wonder why senses are so key to human survival.  With the case of The Last House, we wonder both what is keeping these people locked in their houses and how they are going to survive with limited resources.  With Bird Box and A Quiet Place, I think these movies give us just enough info about the answer that we don't want to know much more.  It's a real tightrope, these kinds of mysteries.  Like, I still don't really know what makes Bird Box work, but I don't want to know.  I just know that it is spooky pooky.  With A Quiet Place, I kind of know too much and I hope that I don't get any more info.  It's better being ambiguous.  But with The Last House, the answer to the mystery isn't worth the mystery itself.

I can't stress enough: the conceit is pretty cool.  The simple notion of being locked in a house is a cool idea.  Heck, as a Covid allegory, it also works pretty well (although probably not on the same political spectrum as I'd probably like.  Let's just say that I'm a big fan of vaccines and masking).  But there are a bunch of reasons why this movie doesn't work and most of it comes from the third act.  The movie desperately wanted to have an answer for what locked these people in their houses.  This might be one of those few examples where "That's just how the world is now" probably was the better answer.  Having a race of mythical squid people who change the rules every time these people start to adapt is frustrating.  The movie gives us rules at the beginning.  There is no way out.  Cool.  I like that.  When the protagonists find a small (and absolutely absurd) workaround for survival, these creatures start appearing and change degrees of hostility.  I'm not quite sure why there are nice ones hunting them.  Also, the notion that these creatures can just flood a house willy-nilly?  As part of the evolving rules, the inhabitants of the house have to keep the windows closed and they have to stay out of sight during rain.  Fine.  But are the squid people stupid?  They see that there's movement inside the house initially and then just go away?  Why didn't they flood the house then?

Okay, I'm going to come out and say it.  Louis Leterrier might not be an amazing director.  I watched the trailer and thought, "Man, this looks incredibly watchable."  But within minutes of the movie, I realized that this movie had a tone problem.  Like, this movie wanted to be fun.  It really wanted to be fun.  I can see the code behind this movie and how much it wanted to be like other movies tonally.  And I really hate throwing actors under the bus, especially considering that I like these actors, but the chemistry is...rough.  Now, I want to immediately backpedal this comment because I think a lot of it comes down to the edit.  One of the things that we have to believe from the outset is the idea that this is a family full of quirks.  In terms of the dialogue, I could see some of this dialogue reflecting a complex family that fundamentally loves each other, even if they get on each other's nerves from time-to-time.  But we're supposed to fall in love with this family and I never quite get that.  

Everything in the film feels stilted.  The jokes never quite land.  Moments that are meant to be cute don't quite play the way that they're supposed to.  If anything, this movie is a race to the finish line.  Now, I don't know much about the world of streaming algorithms.  This movie desperately wants to be under two hours and I don't quite know why.  I honestly think that a lot of this movie would have been fantastic had it been allowed to breathe.  When we look at a movie that has pacing problems, especially with a choppiness that I see in The Last House, often it is because of the limitations of movie theaters.  See, movie theaters thrive on having a shorter runtime.  The shorter the movie, the more showtimes they can offer.  With Netflix, I don't quite understand.  Maybe the longer cut of the movie was a burden and people just weren't finishing the original cut of the movie.  I'm such a cynic, though, that I feel like the whole movie is kind of a mess and  it isn't in the edit.  

Maybe it's in the mimicry.  I think this is a desperate attempt to pleasing a corporate overlord.  I might be touching on something here because this feels right.  Again, I hate dunking on a movie so hard because it is hard to make a movie.  But this all feel like an attempt to become relevant rather than telling a good story.  I keep coming back to the conceit versus the revelation.  Puzzle box stories are compelling because we want to solve them.  With the case of the rain locking people in their houses, there's something fascinating about nature needing people to be locked inside.  Now, maybe I'm so obsessed with formula that it bothers me when formula isn't followed. (Again, I don't really think that's what is going on here.)  This is a story about nature.  We have gotten story after story (again, I don't think that this is a movie about breaking new ground) about how nature seems horrific, but ultimately is a caretaker of the human race, keeping the moniker of "Mother Nature" intact.  So when we see these people being locked in their houses (ultimately leading to many of them dying), it feels like there's a reason that people are locked up.  

The problem with that, of course, is that we find out that this is simply a weapon used by squid creatures that we were unaware of.  I mean, I can't throw too many stones.  We didn't know about the aliens in A Quiet Place until we did.  Okay.  Fine.  But if the seal in The Last House is meant to be a weapon...it's a pretty stupid weapon.  Sure, it ends up killing people in spades.  But how slowly does that work?  We find out in the third act that these creatures have the power to instantly flood a house, killing everyone inside.  It seems like that should be round one, right?  Instead, there's this need to patrol neighborhoods and search for humans.  Not animals.  Animals are allowed to do whatever.  It's the need to kill all the humans.  Why not, upon seeing any movement within a house, flood the house?  That seems like a really good weapon and one that would have worked had the squid creature not entered the house.  It's just silly.

Also, the car thing is a bad Chekhov's gun.  Like, it's there.  There's a whole room devoted to a garage with a car that is waiting to be put together.  Yes, the car is used to fight the squid monster.  But it didn't have something inherent to the car.  It was a way to pull the monster.  Now, normally, no problem with that argument.  But the thing is, the main character, Jason, invents all of these traps to fish for animals outside the house.  They all have springs and traps and lines to catch them.  So when we have the car catch the squid monster, it really could have been anything.  I see this giant set piece and, sure, he interacts with it at one point.  But the car wasn't being a car.  It was there as set decoration.  That's a bummer.

I wanted to like the message of surviving versus living.  It's a good idea.  But it treats the whole thing as very black-and-white.  Jason's got the internal conflict here.  He's destroying his kids' lives because he's trying to keep them alive.  It's just that...the kids' ideas are bad?  Like, I get that I want to see what's out there as well.  (There's no freaking way that anyone could have predicted that the squids would just call off their invasion of humanity because one of them is mildly cool?  It doesn't make sense.  Are the squids simple?  Like, they can just get over that they exterminated most of the population and then just learned to cohabitate without any kind of dialogue?)  It feels like the finale, once Jason learns to get over his survival instinct, is kind of a suicide run.  Is the goal to kill the one squid creature that got into their house?  They know that there are a billion squid creatures out there.  Do they want to punch their way through it?  It seems like the movie is begging us to forget the rules of the movie just to push through.

Golly, this movie was...disappointing.  It had elements of genius.  But it was so bogged down with action elements that it forgot what it meant to be suspenseful.