Chris At The Pictures

Note: these are based on UK release dates

10. Sinister 2 – The beigest movie ever.

Worst bit: That by technicality, I have to call it a ‘horror’ movie

Full review here

9. Jupiter Ascending – That was your last chance, Wachowskis, and you royally blew it.

Worst bit: “Bees can sense royalty”

Full review here

8. Seventh Son – Oh, great, another teen franchise based on a boo-zzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ

Worst bit: Jeff Bridges trying to speak English

Full review here

7. Taken 3 – Remember when Liam Neeson punching foreigners was fun? The film-makers didn’t.

Worst bit: Forest Whitaker’s evil rubber-band

Full review here

6. Knock Knock ­– Keanu Reeves is Nicolas Cage.

Worst bit: Eli Roth is still making films

Full review here

5. Fantastic Four – I’ve never seen a movie more determined to kill itself.

Worst bit: The spark of a good idea being snuffed out

Full review here

4. Mortdecai – Enough to make you run home and shave your whole body.

Worst bit: It’s a hard choice between Johnny Depp, Johnny Depp and Johnny bloody Depp

Full review here

3. Solace – Forgot this existed? I think the actors have, too.

Worst bit: Not sure, it probably happened while I was asleep

Full review here

2. Pixels – A corporate product wearing the freshly harvested skin of an innocent short film.

Worst bit: Too many to choose from, so just draw up a chart of every scene and throw a dart.

Full review here

1. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension 3D – I know what you’re thinking: “Really, it’s not worth getting that annoyed about, is it?”…you didn’t have to watch it.

Worst bit: Active extortion of the audience.

Full review here

‘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