Paranormal Activity 2

Paranormal Activity was an object lesson in micro-budget terror, one that set an impossibly high bar for a commercially inevitable but artistically redundant prequel that doesn’t leave nearly the same psychological imprint. Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat reprise their roles, although the story picks up before the events of the first film and centres on Katie’s sister and her family, who, with the help of a houseful of security cameras, discover that a mysterious evil is the cause of the bumps they’re hearing in the night. Of course, that evil won’t be so mysterious to anyone who’s seen the original. The other suspense-killing flaw is that, whereas Paranormal Activity parceled out its frights in slowly escalating doses, the follow-up blows its body-dragging effects wad too early and often. –Matt Semansky