'Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones' - Review - Chris At The Pictures

Friday, 3 January 2014

'Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones' - Review



‘Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones’ is awful; there are no two ways about it. It is the fifth instalment in a franchise that begun as a tiny, horror film festival favourite and is now past even the death throe stage. We are now at the point where each new sequel has the exact same premise at the previous one: a fairly average person (in this case a teenager and his best friend) starts waving a camera around in a fairly innocuous fashion and notice creepy events (an odd symbol on the boy’s arm, a murder in the house next door) or strange movements around them when re-watching the footage. The events become more and more frequent and disturbing, leading to some kind of climax involving horrific discoveries or acts and a sudden ending designed to be a cliff-hanger for the next film.


The problems with this instalment far outweigh those of previous outings: the lead(s) are incessantly annoying, unlikeable and loud in that kind of frat-boy, laddy teenage stereotype. The supposed scares range from ridiculous to simply laugh out loud funny (I won’t spoil it, but all I’ll say is ‘Chihuahua’…you’ll know it when you see it). I jumped once, which for a ‘horror’ film with elements that – if executed well – could be potentially scary is just depressing. It’s not even the case that the film-makers are trying to make a horror movie anymore; they just cottoned on to the fact that the name itself will attract an audience regardless of the quality of the film and will make a shed-load of money.

The found footage element ran out of steam three films ago so is now just another unwelcome addition to an already tiresome film. It looks like the sort of thing a couple of ‘lads’ might make as a cheap gag video and put on YouTube, complete with poor special effects, ‘scary’ scenes that don’t scare and pointless two scenes of female nudity/partial nudity that only exist to attract a male audience…or at least I think there were two, by the time the second one came around I was irritated and exasperated, silently screaming for something interesting or scary to happen before I went mad with boredom. 

Towards the end, the film tries to make some connection with the original in a similar fashion to 2013’s ‘Insidious Chapter 2’, but falls completely apart, leaving me confused for about five seconds before I realised that I just didn’t care. The characters are so boring, the set pieces are so completely nonsensical and rushed in favour of jump-scare after jump-scare, the story has utterly lost any sense of narrative cohesion, especially in the last act, and it all piles up into one great big stinker of a film. I would make the ‘Parasnoremal’ joke but it’s already been done to death and to be quite honest, I never want to talk about this ‘film’ again if I can help it. I feel genuinely guilty for contributing to its box office takings.

1 Star