"Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones" Movie Review

           




            Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is a spin off of the Paranormal Activity Franchise that is written and direction by Christopher Landon (Writer, Paranormal Activity 4, Paranormal Activity 3, Paranormal Activity 2) and stars nobody. It is about a guy, name Jesse, who, with his friends, Hector and Marisol, starts to find out, after he goes into places he should not have gone to, that he has been “marked” by some supernatural witch thing and weird things are happening to him.

            

            This installment of the franchise is an enjoyable film, but it is because every scene is compressed down to the bare minimum of content that the scene could have. The editors have not learned from their mistakes. They use even more constant jump cuts to make a scene take up the least amount of time it possibly can, while still giving us what we need to know. Though, some scenes go on way too long and do not add anything to the scene. That is not the only good thing that turns out to be a flaw. There is one other: the film is humorous, but that element is used to keep the audience entertained and to try to keep the audience sidetracked from the fact that they are watching a horror movie so they will not know when a scare is coming up, but it does not work. Some of the humor itself does not work, and most of it is characters doing stupid things.

            I only have three pros about the film that do not have a bad side. The film has some good tension that kept me a bit tense and it did have one or two legitimately creepy moments. My biggest pro with the film is it expands the mythology a bit to make it a bit better. Those are the only truly good things I have to say about the film.

            This film has mass amounts of silliness that are incredibly ridiculous, do not work for anything, and I did not buy into them. The ending itself was incredibly ridiculous and goes way, way too far than it needed to. Several of the scares were also ridiculous and had the audience laughing. They would be some of the cheapest jump scares a film could possibly have. Speaking of the scares, there are on new scares added to the franchise. They are all exactly the same as the scares in the previous installments in this franchise. Therefore, they are all incredibly predictable, and every single one of them is a jump scare. Maybe one or two of them are true scares while the rest are just jump scares. They are jump scares that barely even made me jump. This film is also not disturbing one bit. I have been off my game with horror films recently and have found things creepy that I did not find creepy at all in the past when I had a huge horror tolerance. But with this film, I was not bothered one bit.

            This film not only uses the same scares from earlier installments of the franchise, it also copies off of other films. For example, it is incredibly derivative of Insidious: Chapter 2, while doing everything in a much worse way than done in that film. For example, it tried some of the same type of humor that was used in Insidious: Chapter 2 and it does one other thing, which I will not spoil, copied directly from Insidious: Chapter 2 terribly. It also copies off Chronicle a bit with some elements of the story.

            We have some of the stupidest characters in horror movie history here. They do everything in the stupidest way possible to try to get tension out of us, but it does not work. They also do not do, or think, logical things. That does not even go along with the fact that they are incredibly dumb. They just do not use their heads at all. And we only get one scene of character development in this film. The rest of the first half is characters doing stupid things for our entertainment, which does not add anything new to the characters, and just a few scares. There are not even that many scares in this film. All the filmmakers try to do is throw random things at the audience for entertainment that does not work and they throw a few jump scares on the screen.

            This is a problem in most found footage films, but it is still a problem in this one. Why are these idiots still filming this? There is no reason at all to why these things are being filmed. Our one reason to why anything is being filmed in the first place is: “Dad, this is a cool camera. Can I use it?” Another logical flaw is that the characters in the film notice things about the time that we do. They should notice everything first, not at the same time that we do. It is the camera is their eyes. One final flaw is that several scenes in the film seem isolated from the rest of the scenes. There is no recognition of those scenes in the future and they are just there to take up space in the running time because they add nothing to the film.

This is a bad film that is bringing the Paranormal Activity franchise even lower into the ground.

            Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones adds no new scares to the franchise, is incredibly ridiculous all-around, copies off other films, barely even gives us any scares, and is not disturbing in any way.