Paranormal Inactivity
Directed by: Oren Peli
Written by: Oren Peli, Christopher Denham
Starring: Reid Warner, Darrin Bragg, Ben Rovner, Jelena Nik
The H-Bomb: One night while attending a party, idiot college boy Reid sees a bright light in the sky. He then disappears for a period of time, and when he re-appears hours later, he’s in a daze and unable to account for the lost hours. Cut to three months later, Reid has become a full blown UFO nut, obsessed with finding the infamous Area 51, the top secret military base where, legend has it, alien technology, and alien corpses, are stored and studied.
Reid hatches an elaborate scheme to break into Area 51 in order to… uh… well, he’s not sure and neither is the movie. It involves stealing ID cards and fingerprints, as well as wearing insulation suits in order slip by the thermal cameras surrounding the base… I misspoke when I said Reid’s scheme was elaborate, what I meant was, his scheme is fucking crazy. Fucking crazy and fucking stupid.
Crazy or not, he does manage to convince his two best friends, Darrin and Ben, to join him on his quest. As it happens, Darrin has a video camera crazy-glued to his hand that he never turns off, thus ensuring that there will indeed be a detailed, and very fucking incriminating, record of them committing the most utterly retarded break-in ever. I don’t suppose it would spoil anything to say that Reid and his accomplices do in fact make it into the base, and they find more than they ever bargained for… the same cannot be said for the audience.
With Paranormal Activity, writer/director Oren Peli created what is, in my always humble opinion, the single most effective found footage horror film ever made. With its minimalistic approach, and its grounded-in-reality setting, it is a haunted house movie that is genuinely creepy and unnerving in a way most horror films only wish they could be. From that point onward, we’ve seen an array of Paranormal Activity sequels, and other haunted house movies, that have varied in quality. Some have been surprisingly good (The Conjuring), others have been unsurprisingly shitty (Ouija).
Many of these have been co-produced by Peli himself, but I always anticipated his return to the director’s chair, with the hopes he would scare the living hell out of me all over again. Well, with Area 51, a sci-fi take on the found footage horror flick, Peli does indeed return to his director’s chair, and now I wish he had just stayed away. It’s obvious from the video quality alone that Area 51 has been sitting on the shelf since 2009. That is six years ago at the time of this writing, and having seen it, it’s obvious why it’s been collecting dust all this time… it stinks worse than a rotting alien turd.
Whereas Paranormal Activity presented a fresh take on found footage horror, by having crisp, clean camera work, two characters who were actually fleshed out and sympathetic, and creating an atmosphere of isolated dread in a seemingly mundane location, Area 51 simply plays like yet another rip off of The Blair Witch Project, a tedious one at that. The cinematography is herky-jerky, headache-inducing ass, the characters are one-dimensional dimwits who constantly make the worst decisions imaginable, and whose vocabulary is limited entirely to the words “shit” and “fuck” whenever confronted with a stressful situation.
What’s worse, it’s the kind of found footage horror film where nothing of interest happens for the first hour or so. Wouldn’t be so bad if Peli actually bothered to develop the characters or give them any kind of depth. Sadly, as stated, he doesn’t. The front half of the film has our three leads wandering around the Area 51 tourist sites, while repeatedly arguing whether or not breaking into Area 51 is a good idea, and occasionally raising the question of Reid’s sanity. It would be obvious to any halfway intelligent onlooker that Reid is utterly certifiable, but his friends seem willing to give him the benefit of what little doubt there could possibly be.
Of course, once they break into the base, and start encountering all kinds of extra-terrestrial hijinks, the camera work becomes uber-crazy. Whenever an alien is about to appear, the camera conveniently goes completely bat-shit… thus we never really get to see it. Oh, but it’s scarier that way, didn’t you know? It also conveniently cuts down on the special effects budget, kind of like how shooting found footage-style spares the expense of hiring an actual cinematographer. We the audience are so annoyed by the alien we’re not allowed to see, that we don’t even stop to raise the usual found footage questions: “Why is the camera still on?” and “Why are they still filming this shit?”
Those are the issues that plague most films in this sub-genre, if I wanted to harp on issues specific to Area 51, I would bring up the idiotic notion that this top secret instillation would not have any closed circuit cameras inside the base… or that this top secret instillation would only employ a skeleton security crew at night… or that a security card that was stolen two days earlier would not have been disabled… or that our three stooges can run down hallways like a herd of elephants, practically destroy a laboratory, and manage to not attract any attention until they actually make it into a hanger with a goddamn alien spacecraft inside! Fucking hell this movie is stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
And that truly is all that is worth saying about Area 51, when it isn’t insulting our common sense, it’s boring us to tears. I seriously hoped that Peli could pull another Paranormal Activity, and give us something else we hadn’t seen from the found footage horror genre. Instead, he just gave us the worst traits of that sub-genre wrapped in a tedious 91-minute package. The fact that it languished unreleased for so long should have been a tell-tale warning sign, like the ones that surround the real Area 51, the ones that say, “Stay Out.”
