Qt3 Movie Podcast: Paranormal Activity 2

So how is the sequel to one of our favorite horror movies? Find out in our Paranormal Activity 2 podcast. And join us for this week’s 3×3 for our favorite sound effects in movies. We’ll play them for you as well as talk about them, starting at the 49:30 mark.

Tom your audio seems to be out of sync with Kelly Wand and Dingus here. I’m not sure if it gets worse as it goes on or if I only realised what was happening later in the podcast but there are certainly points when you respond to someone before they’ve spoken.

I should’ve just held out on the new thread and waited it out for the PA2 podcast thread to be born.

Without rehashing what little I wrote in the other thread, I’d say Tom represents my perspective pretty well. I agree w/ most criticisms of the whole crew actually. The motivations of the demon diminish the story, the movie didn’t have an iconic establishing frame like the bedroom doorway/stairwell, the baby couldn’t offer a hook for me to relate to, etc. The mom & daughter seemed a bit too pretty and television actor-ish. Kristi looked way too hot the day she returned from the hospital, and I think anyone who’s known a woman that’s given birth, knows that glamor is out the window for a bit post-delivery.

I still enjoyed the heck out of the movie, and was creeped out when I figure I was supposed to be.

Yeah, that was really weird and I’m a bit mystified how that happened. I hope it’s not too intolerable. :( I blame the demon from Paranormal Activity.

 -Tom

The podcast itself is OK, but it gets really bad during the 3x3. Could it be related to playing the sound effects?

I’m pretty sure one thing you guys got wrong is that when the first movie starts, the paranormal stuff is already going on. That’s partly why Micah got the camera to begin with.

So having her mention stuff is happening after the demon has been transferred over to her ties in perfectly.

The problem I have is in the first movie Micah mentions how she didn’t warn him about being haunted since she was eight and she says something about 'how do you bring that up?". Then we see in the second movie that EVERYONE was talking about it well before the events of the first movie.

The baby part was a cheat, twice. First because the baby gets dragged oh so tenderly, while the adults get pulled at about 30mph. Obviously they wanted to have it both ways, let’s mess with the baby but at the same time we won’t do anything bad. Second, because while the demon possessed Katie kills several people without any hesitation, she only carries the baby away. Once again trying to have it both ways. Having established a killer demon over two movies, but backing down when it comes to the key moment the demon has won, suddently the demon shows a maternal side. Gimme a break!

Nothing in the movie said that the demon would kill the boy. Usually those sorts of bargains (see: Rumpelstiltskin) involve the supernatural being taking the child. Possessing the women is just a means to an end.

Fair enough, maybe the demon can claim the soul without killing the kid.

But how do you explain the scene where the demon literally has the baby, lifting the baby out of the crib, then…next time we see the baby he is walking around like normal outside the crib. There is no one there at that time to interfere in any way with the demon’s plan. Yet the baby eventually just wanders around and goes back to his room. The only explanation I can see is they wanted the cheap thrills of a baby in danger but lacked the guts to pursue the logical conclusion.

Perhaps the demon is incapable of opening the front door by itself… shrug Since I never felt the point was to actually harm or kill the baby, I didn’t have any issue with the baby not being harmed or killed.

Remember, this movie happens first. Perhaps during that scene when it is attempting to take the baby, and it leads the baby into the basement and all that, the demon learns that it cannot take the baby on its own. At which point it decided to possess the mother… and then to possess Katie… so that it can take the baby.

Has anyone else recently had trouble downloading the show through iTunes? I’ve just started to get an error message that says " ‘Quarter to Three’ does not seem to be a valid Podcase URL" when i try to update the podcast.

But the point is if it can ‘take’ the mom and possess her, and ‘take’ Katie and possess her, why couldn’t it take the baby? Why did it lead the baby downstairs as opposed to dragging it like the mom and Katie?

It seems obvious to me that there is no logical story based reason, just that they did not want to cross a line with showing violence towards the baby. I can completely understand that…except then why write a script that puts a baby in demonic danger AND even have the demon take the baby at the end if you’re just going to wimp out?

You are asking questions I can’t answer… I mean, I can make up answers, but it isn’t my mythology. Why couldn’t it possess the baby the way it did the women? Maybe it can only possess women. Why lead the baby downstairs instead of dragging it? Because it doesn’t want to hurt the baby since it needs the baby unharmed.

In the original there was no logical story based reason for the demon to be coming after Katie other than “because”. Did that bother you as much?

I dont know whether it’s related to the itunes problem, but this episode hasnt shown up on the RSS feed I was using either…

In a nutshell:

First movie, demon wants Katie. Payoff? Katie possessed, kills her loved one by throwing him at the camera. Second movie, demon really wants baby. Payoff? Katie possessed, kills her loved one by throwing her at the camera.

The storyline of demon after baby, which the second movie hangs its thrills and chills on, has no dramatic resolution. The most you can say is “oh yeah, Katie walks away with the kid”, yeah and what of it? Uh, I don’t know. That equals a big fizzle to me.

In the first movie they get away with not giving specifics, because there’s a payoff that gives a direction for speculation. The second movie is a total blank when it comes to the fate of that kid. Not cool in my book.

Yeah, the second they give Hunter a cute closeup, I knew they were gonna puss out instead of amping up the bad vibes that made the first movie iconically unsettling. & they did.

The demon mollycoddles the baby; it treats Hunter nicer than his own parents did. (& like I told Tom and Minchowski after the gibber-fest, that cupboard showboating was totally out of character.)

& any movie that thinks I care more about a generic baby than a dog is an automatic C minus. In Amityville they go back for the dog.

^Good points.

My buddy and I were cracking up over the extremely sensitive treatment of the baby, and I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Worst thing the kid got all movie was the crib treadmill.

Oh, and your podcast feed is broken.

To fix the podcast feed, you have to go to iTunes, click the “Advanced” menu option at the top, and select “Subscribe to podcast”. Then paste this in the box:

http://quartertothree.com/fp/?feed=podcast

I’m not sure what happened or if there’s any way to fix it before posting the next podcast, but that fixed it for me.

And that out-of-sync error is really ugly. Sorry for that, guys. I guess no more shows with sound clips. :(

 -Tom

Add the sound clips after the fact, I guess.

That was the worst part of the sequel for me, the copying of the original for the final scene. Come on, guys. You can do something different, it’s ok!

Pretty sure that’s because they are milking things for a sequel. I mean it’s not that big a mystery (why it was so open-ended, I mean) and it doesn’t leave anything more open than the conclusion of the first film. Of course pretty much everyone in the audience reacted poorly to it, but they always do that to open endings.

I don’t really see how significantly different the endings are.

It did way more bad things in the sequel! The mom, the dad, the dog, come on now!

You lost me here. The demon wants the boy as payment. Why would it knock him around and draw suspicion? See, the demon attacks the mom so that once the jig is up and the non-believers un-Scully themselves and go full Mulder, it’s all about worrying over/protecting her and not the baby. Demons are clever!

Well, most of the time they are clever :( Yeah, I have to agree that that was a cheap scare and out of character as it were. I guess it’s an homage to the kitchen scenes from Poltergeist and The Sixth Sense taken one annoying step further (BTW, man does Poltergeist not hold up. That kitchen scene borders on whimsical when viewed today). I liked how it kept screwing with the aquadroid. That’s good stuff.

So scaring the dog so bad it has a seizure isn’t enough? Also “generic baby,” damn Kelly. Easy on the goonspeak.

I am shocked the film wasn’t horrible and was not a complete waste of time. I think it used a lot of what made the first film a fun time - the building sense of activity and dread of same with each night, the quasi-mystery behind its motives, the blundering ignorance of the male lead - and kept the ball rolling. I like that they put in fake clips in the trailers - they should have used nothing but fake clips, that would have been funny. I was surprised that I felt a small pang of sympathy over Micah’s eventual fate when he made his cameo appearance. Yeah, he was a dumbass but there are worse crimes than trying to protect your girlfriend, especially when she has nice cans.

Having pondered why I was so disappointed in this movie, I think it boils down to how they Lucas-ized the demon and shattered his mystique (I consider it a “he”). In the first movie, we see possessed Katie standing up and staring expressionlessly at Micah while he sleeps for 6 hours. In the dark. I love this sense of inscrutable Otherness. Why’s it doing that? What’s it thinking? It’s a demon, its time sense is so foreign to ours that we, or rather the “authorities” aka filmmakers, have to fast-forward the time code for 6 hours just to watch it. But for the demon 6 hours is nothing. Or is it? Why’s it watching him anyway? Because it’s a demon. We can’t relate. Its unknowable and unknowably malicious.

By comparison, in the second movie, we learn that great-grandmothers can make bargains with the demon. That it just wants to cuddle cute babies. That it helpfully spells out babies’ names on Ouija boards that no one notices. That it can be scared off temporarily by incense, annoyed temporarily by dogs, be temporarily bought off by burnt photos, and knock cameras over in a basement sequence with no payoff and no injuries to anyone. That it executes predictable scares and jolts right on cue when we expect it, all the time. I vastly preferred Micah’s succinct explanation in the first movie: “Demons…suck.”

I’m sort of bummed this is probably going to be a milked-dry franchise. Horror masterpieces are better as one-offs. Speaking of which, in the novel sequel to Rosemary’s Baby, by the original author, you find out everything in the first book (and movie) was a dream. /goosebump