Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

Released in 2007 for festival screening and than eventually to limited release in September 2009, Paranormal Activity was a good horror movie. Even though not an original idea, it was a scary film that introduced good new characters and along with "The Blair Witch Project", Paranormal Activity made found footage movies even more mainstream.

Now in 2014 after four sequels and a fifth one due in October, you can't really look at the first Paranormal Activity the same way. The series now seems like a money grab and it's sequels were an up and down thing with the third one being the best. The new spin off film, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is really an even bigger question mark.

The movie is set in a rundown Hispanic community and some would call it the hood. Recent high schools graduates Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and best friend Hector (Jorge Diaz) learn and discover that Jesse's neighbor on the bottom level of their apartment, a very creepy lady, has died mysteriously. After her death, Jesse's life is turned upside down once he learns he has some type of bite mark on arm. The story involves black magic, witches and a possessed Jesse.

What first stands out about this film and what is different than the others, is the cast. Like the other films of the series, this cast is full of unknown actors which make this film seem real. Andrew Jacobs is a fresh lead who is likable and he's works with the others and there is a lot of character development in this movie. Jorge Diaz brings humor to this film which is something we have never seen before in this series. Even the grandmother of the story played by Renee Victor who speaks no English in this film works as being the foreign character and sparks her own laughs. Sure, most all the characters lack substance and most you can't tell the difference between them but they are still fun characters.

The movie is set in a different atmosphere that I like but the story lines follow similar paths. The characters go predictable ways, the kills are typical and besides it's ending, most of the movie is not very scary. The themes and substance which includes witches and black magic are light and really most of those ideas don't have much to them.

  


Who knows what the future holds for this series but I am not seeing how this movie connects to the rest of the series or connects at all just in itself. The ending which has references to the previous movies just looks thrown together and really has no meaning. This is a film that really leaves us in the middle and with a feeling of nowhere to go further. Its seems like it is up to us to figure out  just what is going on or what it means.

In the end, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is kind of a mess and it is hard to get used to but at the same time it's an above average film. It is a very interesting film that I can tell already is going be one of the most different films I am going to review all year long. Just like The Devil Inside from last year, this film is a strange way to start a new year.

3/5

The Devil Inside

As many movie fans know, January is a terrible month for released films coming out. The film quality of January-released movies is usually very low, and for a person like me living in Michigan, it is  usually better to just watch the snow fall. The year 2012 was no better for January-released movies. Stinkers like One for the Money, Red Tails and the very crappy limited release horror film, Beneath the Darkness were released. The Devil Inside was released in this month but it was one of the more interesting ones. It brought something a little different to the horror genre and was one of the films from the January pool that really could have been something but it still really missed it's mark.

The Devil Inside is an exorcist/Cathohic religion-themed movie. It is the story a middle-aged woman traveling to Rome in 2009 to find her mentally unstable mother who was put away due to a killing that happened during an exorcism twenty years before.

The movie is filmed in the documentary found footage style. I usually like found footage movies but I didn't like this one. It seemed  as if the entire film was trying to copy the other successful found footage films of the past decade without looking at the bigger picture. The found footage style here is really unnecessary and gives the film an uneven quality and is the main reason that the film is not scary.

Just like the film Rite did in 2011, The Devil Inside setting is in the Vatican. While this is an interesting setting, there really is no passion to this film and the director William Brent Bell doesn't seem to know much about the place or the subject. This seems to be just thrown together and again Bell seems to be just trying to piggy-back on the success of the previous found footage films.

In just about every part of the film, we don't really care about the characters who are very dry and not developed and frankly it gets worse as the film goes on. Most of the characters are witless with no real soul or even human-like qualities. That said, the character David does starts to change and this gives the film a new approach that kind of fits.

The ending is frankly bad. I do get the feeling that Bell didn't quite know what to do with the ending and it seems thrown together and makes everything before seem meaningless; it is that bad.

I don't mind exorcist type movies but there hasn't been one done right in a long time. As a matter of fact, I think this subject matter only really worked once and that was in The Exorcist in the 1970's and now these movies just seem to be trendy and geared to the teen crowd. Because of it's religious theme, I will say that The Devil Inside is really a sin and just an all-around wrong discombobulated creation of a film. Avoid.

1.5/5