Parody films used to be appreciated more back in the day. Back when Leslie Nielson lit up the screen with amazing comedy that was both rude, random, and hysterical. They have changed a lot since then, and only a few remain great in the ways they began. The rest seem to hold a similar pattern of going way too far, and not making any sense. You can already tell from the title that "30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" will be one of those failing films. Their first mistake was one of the easiest to avoid, the title, which they didn't even try on. After watching this film, you will begin to notice the title is not the only thing lacking attempt.
As mentioned above, poorly done parody films are often confusing regarding plot of the film. There is an easy explanation to that, but we'll get to that in a second. To give you an idea of what the film is about, just look at the title, it is obviously based off of "30 Days of Night", "Paranormal Activity", "The Devil Inside" and randomly "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". The arc of the film followed closest to "Paranormal Activity" with the found footage and overall story. However, there was way more films, television shows, and even commercials spoofed throughout the movie. Way too much, out of context and out of place.
It would be impossible to mention how many things are spoofed in the film unless you were taking note of every time something popped up. Did it make any sense? Not at all. Sure, they may have been aiming for random humor, but it just shows up as random without the humor, and just plain annoying. It was incredibly jumbled up, and no one will be able to follow the story at all. Not that the story was any good, because it wasn't. That is why parodies are often confusing, because they have no idea about how to organize their material appropriately.
The reason why the story was ridiculous is because a lot of people, probably the filmmakers included, find many horror films to be alike. So, whoever it was that wrote this, thought these films could interact with each other well because they were so similar. The problem with that is the fact that they aren't similar. At all. The stories don't mingle well, and yes, it adds to the cluster and adds to the growing population of parody-haters.
So, the comedy is terrible, the story is lazy and put together by someone who doesn't understand film, and the acting was horrid. Not only this, but the editing was bad too. In "Paranormal Activity" and films like it, there is often a timer on the bottom right hand side of the screen that tells the time. Because it is found footage, it is often cut at weird places. Usually, the editor is smart enough to not only cut the video of the person popping around the screen, but to also cut the timer so the time at least looks appropriate. In this movie, we have the cut video frames with a person popping around the room signifying time past, with a timer that continues on the bottom as if it is a continuous shot. That is just lazy and unprofessional, and again….doesn't make a lick of sense.
Towards the beginning of the film, we have two women that find a tape that says "found footage" and when they play it, it would appear to have the elements of found footage while being made fun of at the same time. One issue, there is narration. You will never find a found-footage film with narration. That part wasn't making fun of found-footage or anything, it was just poorly written like everything else. This movie is bad folks, don't mess around with it. If the devil were a filmmaker that made movies just to get people angry, this movie would be worse.
"30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" comes to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 15!
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