No new music releases today

Seriously. There are no new albums coming out today. This is the desolate wasteland between Christmas and the start of the new year, so I imagine that checking out the new release racks this afternoon will consist mainly of restocks.

However, there are a couple of DVD releases today that bear discussing. There will be spoilers, so stop reading now if you don’t want anything ruined. First up: Paranormal Activity. The wife and I watched it this weekend, and it’s terrible. I disliked it the first two times I saw it, when it was called The Amityville Horror and The Blair Witch Project. The premise is sound, but every instance of horror is ruined by going that one giant leap past cool and interesting into cheesy and ridiculous.

Case in point: there’s a scene where a planchette is left on a Ouija board, and it starts moving by itself. Creepy, right? Then wind starts to blow inside the house — a bit much. Then the Ouija board catches on fire, and we’ve crossed the line into idiocy. The whole movie is like this, with things that would have been eerie and unexplainable pushed to their illogical conclusions. Had the acting been less wooden, the build-up less belabored, and the points made subtly, rather than hammered home hamfistedly, this might have lived up to the hype.

Secondly, we’ve got a purposefully cheesy film in Jennifer’s Body. Megan Fox is amazingly attractive, in a way more akin to a porn star, or like the prettiest girl in the trailer park, but she couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper bag. Thankfully, she’s not asked to do much, and Amanda Seyfried does a fine job of carrying the movie.

Diablo Cody really wanted this to be a horror Heathers, but it just tries too hard. It carries through with the violence, and entertains all the way through, but it’s no Re-Animator or Dead Alive in terms of horror comedies. It’s more like Mean Girls with a body count — not that it’s a bad thing.