Low-budget in the extreme, the sequel to last year's "Blair Witch"-inspired spooky relies on a found-document captured by surveillance cameras strategically placed by suburban homeowners to capture the ghostly happenings that occur.
Video footage ostensibly taken by members of the family break up extended lulls of stagnate surveillance footage that reveals more movement in the on-screen clock than any would-be ghastly events. Low on atmosphere — there's no music score and the action takes place almost entirely inside the home — the anti-narrative involves a family of four, their Latina housekeeper, and the wife's sister and brother-in-law.
As if it matters, housewife Kriste is the sister to the first film's female character Katie whose husband Micah we are informed by an inter-title during the first act will be dead in "60 days."
With a teenaged daughter and a toddler named Hunter, Kristie and hubby Dan want to know who or what trashed their home without taking anything. There's also a mystery involving the automatic pool cleaner that miraculously ends up on the pool deck every morning.
Pots fall from their hooks, doors open and close, kitchen cabinets slam open, and weird noises happen in the middle of the night. An utter lack of any thematic impulse beyond making its audience periodically jump in their seats makes the movie feel more like a film student experiment than something you would pay money to see.
Where a director like Michael Haneke or William Friedkin would inject layers of social commentary to give the dark material universal meaning, the best this trifle can do is allow its competent cast to give naturalistic performances. It's all sheen and no grit. An especially irritating oversight comes at the expense of the surveillance-camera subplot that Dan barely refers to after they're installed. Some embarrassingly primitive special effects show the film's unfinished seams.
Television writer Michael R. Perry relies on a literal ghost-in-the-machine storyline that would send Robert McKee into a fit. For anyone who thinks "Paranormal Activity" is a good horror film, I'd suggest seeing Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." It's like comparing a peanut-butter-and-white-bread sandwich to a porterhouse steak. One sticks in your mouth, the other fills you up.
Rated R. 109 mins.
