Paranormal Activity – Double Feature

June 18, 2011 @ 6:44 pm

You now have the whole story (until a third movie) presented in Chronological order.
A cool thing to have for the fans of these movies.
Video is good, audio too; even if the audio volume of the second part (so the first movie) is a bit higher.

I found the original movies okay.
They all have borings parts, and interesting parts. Very few really scary parts, in fact, but I don’t know why I liked them. The prequel is a better movie, IMO, but the first one also have its good parts. I mean that even if the order of events are more or less the same in both movies, it does not feel (too much) of a rehash of what we just seen, in this edit. (hope I’m clear, lol)

In a good mood I would rate the original movie 8/10.
As this fanedit do not really pretend to change the movies themselves (just making a new way of watching them) I would rate this edit also 8/10.
This could seem unfair because there are a lots of faneditors taking months and months making fanedits and getting a 7/10 for example, but when it comes to rating you generaly can’t give a fanedit a lesser rate because the idea is simple and it do not have 236 cuts in it.

Side note:
The actress playing Katie obviously ate some hamburgers between the shooting of the two movies: too bad for continuity… Just kidding, she’s fine and she delivers a good performance.

June 23, 2011 @ 9:36 pm

Unfortunately I can’t rate quite as high as TMBTM. I felt that in order to justify combining these two movies, they require a great deal of further editing to make them feel more cohesive and less dull. The whole slow buildup with part 2 now stuck in the middle is a total buzzkill, and the total runtime for a horror movie that was slow-paced to begin with is even more of a buzzkill. I knew going into this that nothing was cut, but I really was hoping there was more intercut splicing throughout than there is. I now see what people were talking about that this feels more like an extended edition than a true fanedit.

The video and audio visual quality from a ripping/encoding standpoint is fine. From an editing standpoint, the audio is louder in PA1, which I found to be rather annoying and pulled me out of the story even more than the already obvious jump from the one movie to the next.

The story from a straight narrative standpoint works, but from a storytelling standpoint fails for the reasons stated above.

Given the limited cuts, problems with those limited cuts, plus the storytelling issues, I cannot give this fanedit more than an average 5/10 rating. That said, if you are a big fan of the movies and really want to watch then in chronological order in their entirety, this edit does achieve that goal.

January 3, 2012 @ 7:03 am

It’s a little hard to give this an accurate rating. Technically, this edit is perfect. Video looked great. Audio was fine to me. The editing was done well. The problem for me was how little it was edited. It’s obvious to me (from reading Sunarep’s description of the edit) that he really enjoys these movies and wanted to create a double-feature instead of a new take on it. In that, he succeeded.

Me, I’m not way too crazy about these movies. I like the first movie and think it holds up well on repeat viewings. But the second movie is boring. Way too boring for me. I feel that a good 2-hour movie can be made out of these and I would love see Sunarep’s take on that.

As it is, I feel that this is a 6/10. It’s not terrible, but I wouldn’t recommend it beyond the die-hard fans of Paranormal Activity.

(NOTE: This review was given before this edit was in the category of "Special Project". Some ratings have been adjusted and shit.)