‘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 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
1 Star