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91With its this-is-really-happening vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.
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90This is a brutal, exhausting, and genuinely horrifying little ghost flick.
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88An ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary.
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83The film loses some of its grimy verisimilitude toward the end, but it's nevertheless a surprisingly effective low-budget shocker with a sensibility as current as the latest viral videos, yet rooted in the suggestive, less-is-more atmospherics of Val Lewton.
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80An Amityville for the YouTube age: potent, primal and genuinely frightening.
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80It's a hit for the most surprising reason of all: because it's very good.
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80Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theater, is refreshingly blood-free.
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80Peli works at mining the unknown, the unknowable, like a minimalist, using small moments and virtually no special effects exceedingly well.
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80Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about PA is that it's not just a fun thrill ride; it's an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy.
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80Paranormal succeeds in staying unnervingly "real."
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75With a $15,000 budget too puny to empty a petty-cash drawer, the no-frills Paranormal Activity comes packed with thrills.
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75Like legendary producer Val Lewton in the '40s, director Oren Peli, who shot "Paranormal" in seven days in his own home, understands that what's most frightening is what you don't see but merely suggested.
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An impressive, not entirely successful exercise in minimalist filmmaking.
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75Succeeds in its modest goals of building tension slowly and generating a handful of legitimate scares. A few people in the audience were laughing during the first half of the film. No one was laughing during the long walk out of the theater.
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75No-frills chills are what Paranormal Activity offers in unrelenting supply.
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70I've never seen a movie that so cunningly exploits our anticipation.
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70It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.
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63The movie's faults aside, this is the kind of show where half the fun is watching it in the company of a large group of people.
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"Paranormal" ultimately does deliver in a way that "Blair Witch" never did, but its achingly slow buildup is a test not just of an audience's patience but the power of hype surrounding the latest alternative scary movie.
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60A "Blair Witch"-y creepshow that owes a lot to Japanese horror.
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60Often has the feel of a film-school exercise in which the object is to wring maximum suspense from rudimentary tools.
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50Even at 85 minutes, the movie contains maybe 50 minutes that scare.
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50A crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year.
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0Don't believe the hype: Paranormal Activity may be a lot of things, but the words "scary" and "movie" are not among them. It is instead nothing more or less than an excruciatingly tedious YouTube gag cleverly marketed to go viral in the broadest and most box office-friendly way.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 137 out of 263
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Mixed: 22 out of 263
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Negative: 104 out of 263
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Oren Pelli's "Paranormal Activity" is a decent movie in the 'scary' category, but a fantastic one in the 'psychology' category.
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ChrisC9
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Paranormal Activity lacks scares, very boring and highly predictable found footage flick that is really overrated.