‘Paranormal 2’ is a more normal film

By Roger Moore

Orlando Sentinel

You only get to take the movie world utterly by surprise once.

But you can, if you’re going back to that “Paranormal Activity” well one more time, produce a more polished, more “studio”-looking film the second time around — even if it’s allegedly built around home-surveillance video and camcorder footage of an ordinary So Cal family under supernatural assault.

Tod Williams’ “Paranormal Activity 2,” a sequel-prequel to Oren Peli’s scruffy, much-tinkered-with no-budget hit, is a confident, cocky and often comic promenade down the same primrose path. It had multiple writers, which give it a funnier touch for its first half and a far more conventional Hollywood Horror finish. Stakes are raised; the effects are more special. And when you have a Paramount budget, even a modest one, you can afford to film a child actor and a dog until they give you the shots you need, becoming the most special effects of all.

We have another suburban family — this one tucked in a much more lived-in two-story tract house — broken faucets, stained carpets. There’s a new baby, a second marriage for the father, Daniel (Brian Boland, good), a doting mom (Sprague Grayden, also pretty good), dad’s teen daughter from his first marriage (Molly Ephraim, sassy and believable) and a connection to the folks who were haunted in “Paranormal Activity.”

So naturally, things start going bump in the night. And as we learned in the first film, when they start going bump in the daytime, that’s when you really need to worry.

Dad’s an “I don’t believe in that stuff” skeptic who chases away their superstitious Latina housekeeper. Mom is more credulous. And Ally, the daughter, wonders if these loud noises are her late mother trying to have a chat from the Hereafter. Paging Matt Damon!

Things start out jokey — nerdy parents, faux cool kid, let’s laugh at the pans falling and the house being ransacked. Then the surveillance video starts to win family members over, one by one.

“Paranormal Activity” worked by lulling us, feeding the viewer banality and inactivity until a tiny thing — a door opening, a shadow — jolted you into awareness. Williams and Co. aren’t nearly that subtle. But the best effects are still the simplest — a pool vacuum that crawls out of the water, by itself, in time-lapse, a dog alert to something we don’t see, a toddler excitedly waddling over to a mirror.

The movie’s shortcomings are the Hollywood literalism in the third act, the need to show us things and connect dots that we don’t need to connect. The acting is better, but the hair-raising moments are mostly encores, with the occasional clich d leap at the camera, a body suddenly jerked off camera and the like.

It’s not a bad movie, far less graphic than most studio or indie horror these days. Even at less than 90 minutes, it takes its time to lull us into a false sense of security. But the horror movie tropes that turn up make this “Paranormal” feels a lot more “normal” and run of the mill than you’d expect.

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