Axiom's Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 Stars

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!

I watch films generally to be entertained. Films can be smart (like Shaun of the Dead) or dumb (like Orgy of the Dead), serious (like The Shawshank Redemption) or silly (like Orgy of the Dead), and as long as I can be entertained by it I’m all right. Yes, I can give the filmmakers kudos for making do with a small budget and I can think that some of the f/x they come up with are cool, but at the end of it all I have to enjoy the story. How much money they had to make the thing never enters into it, just like who the stars are—if any—never really matter to me very much (although I will watch something just because Sandra Bullock or Matthew McConaughey is in it), it’s all about the story and if I can enjoy it. And I have levels in my head, ways I look at stories, that are different depending on the type of story it is. Horror/fantasy gets a pass on logic with me that science fiction will never get, and for me the best stories are ones that show one supernatural happening and have everything else in the story proceed logically from that premise. There can be dozens of oddball things that occur in the story so long as they proceed logically from the original single premise. This is exactly why shows like Medium get a 5 Star rating from me: It’s a storyline that has one central theme, a woman is psychic, and proceeds logically from that premise to show the effects on her family and friends. And I can forgive any minor inconsistencies in the story because it’s all about something we know very little about anyway, something akin to magic as far as we can see at the moment.

Paranormal Activity has already been discussed here on the site and just about everywhere else I can think of. Who hasn’t been regaled with the tales of the director remodeling his own home (he couldn’t have just rewrote the script a little—I mean, was it really that important that they have an upstairs?) in order to make it fit his script, or the fact that the film was shot on a budget of between $11,000 and $15,000, or that it’s based on a true story (probably true in the same alternate dimension where The Blair Witch Project really happened)? And why have we all heard so much about this picture? Because it really is a great film. It has the things that make a great horror picture, that perfect mix of reality and dark fantasy. In order to make a truly great horror story one must have characters the audience can either identify with or at least feel they know and care about. This is what dooms Rob Zombie’s horror films and elevates classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist to superstar status. And there should also be, if not a realistic horror, at least a horror that feels real to the audience, that preys on some primal fear and uses it to great effect. Demonic possession is very good because it combines our fear of the unknown with our fear of other people—and, really, what’s scarier than a person totally out of their head?

I’m not going to discuss the story itself here but I just learned, after seeing the film Saturday, that there are at least two other endings to the film, and that the current theatrical one was tacked on by Paramount in order to make way for a sequel. And, apparently, this was at the behest of Steven Spielberg, who has evidently done too much “LDS” with Spock back in the 60’s. How many people here would rather have seen Spielberg’s planned sequel to Jaws, which would have been the story of the USS Indianapolis, than what we got in Jaws 2? In the story behind Paranormal Activity, it seems to me that any “sequel” should follow the thing we never see, the demon itself, rather than any of the characters we do see on the screen. And I would have to say, upon hearing of the main original ending (one other ending was shown only once), that I would think it fit the picture better than what they gave us. And what they gave us isn’t bad, really. It’s creepy enough—all the teenage girls in the theater left scared to death—and it is kind of logical—although if it could do that I don’t understand why it just didn’t do it earlier—but it seems to me the original ending, from what I’ve heard, would have made even more sense, and been more tragic in some ways than what they gave us. Also, I’ve always believed that what we don’t see is almost always better than what we do when it comes to horror.

All the above taken into account, this is still an excellent movie that I enjoyed as much as any new picture I’ve seen this year.