Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

2014
Directed by Christopher B. Landon
Starring Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz and Gabrielle Walsh

Never underestimate the power of low budgets combined with the power of horror fans hungry for anything new.  Yes, folks, we're up to Paranormal Activity 5, a.k.a The Marked Ones.  While the overaching plot of the series was wrapped up in the last one, the massive amounts of profit that these flicks continued to pull in meant that it was too much to ask that the series end there.  Thus, it's time for the spinoff, baby.  Or, more accurately, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Brace yourself.

While I saw the first two films in theaters, I was at least aware of the release of the third and fourth movies during their original theatrical runs.  Not so with this one.  Maybe I was just in some sort of boredom-induced coma in January of 2014.  Maybe I was still reeling from reviewing all of those godawful Leprechaun films.  But for whatever reason, the last two movies in this franchise completely slipped my radar.  Apparently I was in the minority, since it once again grossed a king's ransom on a budget of only $5 million.  The important thing that you need to know is that the folks at Blum House still had a legitimate cash cow on their hands, and even though this film is pretty bad all things considered, I can't fault them in the least bit for keeping the gravy train going.  And while it is technically a spinoff, it also links up with the original series at the end in a way that I promise not to spoil.  Once again, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Ch ch ch ch.

I'll be the first person to admit that I knew nothing about this movie going on and had no idea what I was in store for, but I certainly didn't plan on what we got, and that's a story set in a Latin neighborhood in California.  The switch in locales actually was a very fresh idea that gave the story all kinds of new possibilities.  Maybe.  But the characters that inhabit this story...oh man.  Broken record, I know.

The main duo consists of Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and his best friend Hector (Jorge Diaz).  The former is a good student/good brother/good son/all-around good guy.  Hector is just kind of...there.  I don't know.  He's there to be Jesse's slightly more irresponsible best friend, and if you put a propeller on this guy's cap I wouldn't bat an eye.  These two are just criminally uninteresting, and since the main crux of what is to come places one of them under consistent eternal damnation, that's a problem.  We DO get the character of Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh), the two guys' female friend who actually does command the screen with something other than apathy.  She's also pretty hot.  The three have just graduated high school and are ready to have fun throughout the summer until the ghost dimension comes a-calling.  There's also a few side characters like Jesse's dad and grandmother, but they're not important.  And there is your Paranormal Activity character wrap-up.

If you've been reading these reviews, you know what comes next:  The Set Up, and this time around it's actually pretty nifty.  Hector has a new camera and carries it around everywhere, providing all of the convenient first-person perspective that by this point I had just accepted.  One night at Jesse's apartment they hear strange chanting coming from the apartment below them.  They use some MacGyver-esque cunning to look at what's going on, catching a naked woman standing utterly still while the crazy neighbor lady draws a symbol on her stomach.  Not soon after, crazy neighbor lady is found murdered by one of their classmates.  And not soon after that, the three best friends (Jesse, Hector and Marisol) invade murdered crazy lady's apartment and find a demon book, quickly perform one of the rituals inside, and then funny stuff starts to happen.

In many ways, this flick kind of reminds me of your typical Twilight Zone episode.  Regular Guy gets Amazing Power.  Regular Guy reacts to getting Amazing Power, usually in very irresponsible and greedy ways.  Regular Guy then gets comeuppance in the end for his arrogance in the face of using Amazing Power for evil.  That's what we get here, as the ritual seems to result in Jesse being impervious to being hurt.  It first manifests itself at a pickup basketball game where the local hoods intervene and start to shove Jesse around, only to be shoved something like 357 feet away by an unseen force.  It seems that whatever Jesse does, there is some invisible force protecting him.  But since this is a scary movie, it also starts to control him and make him do bad, bad things.  Slowly, I assure you.

This is one slow movie.  Sometimes, that can be good, as there's nothing quite as satisfying as a good scary slow burn.  By this point, though, the whole concept of these movies had worn thin on me and I was just waiting for the whole thing to be over.  Having said that, there is one NIGHTMARISH sequence that actually did frighten me as it happened, with Jesse waking up in the middle of the night, heading down to the cursed apartment, finding the trap door in said cursed apartment (in a sequence involving a hot girl that Jesse almost hooked up with earlier in the movie, no less)...and, yeah.  Watch for yourself.  To me, there are few things scarier than being trapped in a confined space, trying to escape, and then watching in terror as you're locked inside.  So A+++ to the movie for this sequence.  And...it has a final scene that actually works despite its clunkiness.  If you just watched all of these movies back-to-back like I did, I suspect that it probably was a little more effective than if you'd seen them all in theaters months and years apart.

Out of all five films thus far, this is easily the most cringey when it comes to the subject of realism.  We're asked to believe quite a bit when it comes to Hector's camera that everyone always seems to have at all of the best moments, but you're probably sick of me beating that dead horse.  But some of the things that camera CAPTURES...like Jesse going full rampage mode in the middle of a convenience store.  Or that bit right before the finale with the two gangsters arriving at this movie's Cult Compound (Trademark Sign) and blowing a couple murderous cultists away with shotguns...yeah, it was comedic gold, but not in the way the movie would have liked.

Oh, and there's a recurring bit involving an old Simon game that serves a a stand-in for a Ouija board.  Yeah.  It happens.

The biggest strike against this movie is that the story itself just is not very interesting.  Jesse gets a demon friend.  Bad things happen to people.  A mystery is unraveled about a worldwide cult using firstborn sons as some sort of possessed killer army.  It's actually an interesting idea that could be FANTASTIC if this movie weren't a found footage film, but the way it's portrayed here on such a small scale is terminally boring.  And the characters that we take the ride along with don't make the ride any smoother, believe me.  Well, except for Marisol.  She's captivating for any reason that you want to interpret.

* 1/2 out of ****.  I didn't think it was any worse than the last installment, but boy is this series starting to show its age.  Again, however, this movie grossed $90 million dollars.  We horror fans...we're a loyal bunch.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

2012
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Kathryn Newton, Matt Shiveley, Aiden Lovekamp, Brady Allen and Katie Featherston

Folks...just because it's there doesn't mean you have to watch it.  I posted an entire rant on this very subject several months back, and it's required reading for everyone in the entire world.  For everyone who missed it, the gist of it is this: I continue to be amazed (literally, it boggles my brain) how many people continue to force themselves to watch every movie franchise or TV series that they no longer enjoy with the rationale being "well, I've watched everything up until this point, so I guess I have to watch the rest."  Um...no, you don't.  Unless there is some law on the books that says that once you see the first film or episode of something that a man hides out in your closet with a gun trained at your head unless you follow said thing to completion, you're perfectly free to, you know, skip out once it starts to suck.  The Law of Diminshing Returns tends to hit like a motherfucker, and I present Paranormal Activity 4 as the proof.

Oh boy, this film.  'Memba how I said that I gave up on this series in theaters after the second one because it wasn't as good as the first?  Well, the twenty bucks I spent on this box set is going to have to motivate me to keep going forward, because this one just wasn't good.  The first, again, was a legitimately scary flick.  The second had its fair share of shocks, and the third at least had that great sequence with the sheet and the rotating fan cam.  In this one, there's a whole lot of nothing.  It does have a few redeeming factors that I'll get to a few paragraphs from here, but overall it's just a very tepid and borderline BORING time.  The market seemed to agree; while this movie still made a massive profit off of its $5 million budget, the gross was significantly lower than the first three films.  There really is only so much you can do with this formula, but let's see how much more I can pull out of my ass in explaining it.  THE MOVIE!

For those keeping score, Paranormal Activity 3 was a prequel film that gives us the back story and motivation behind everything that has happened so far.  I threw a little spoiler alert in the last review before I mentioned exactly what it was, but hell, these movies are already old by this point, so what does it matter?  Think lots of witches' covens, first-born son sacrifices and other assorted demonic debauchery.  That one handled the back story, and this one is actually a sequel to the second movie, which ended with cursed Katie from the original film killing her sister and taking her infant son away.  Five years later, and here we are.

The setup:  This time around, your main character is a teenage girl.  Named Alex, she's played by Kathryn Newton, and the character is unfortunate.  See, this isn't just a teenage girl; it's a 2010s teenage girl brought to life on the screen, which means Converse sneakers, skinny jeans and constant phone browsing every time there is a dull moment.  I don't know if a single paragraph has ever made me feel older typing it, but here we are.  Can't close that Pandora's Box.  She has a boyfriend named Ben (Matt Shiveley), and during the course of their Titanic-esque courtship Ben records their Skype sessions and begins seeing weird stuff happening in the house.  There's your recording motif, as computers are what captures everything this time.

The meat:  The rest of the family consists of a pretty nondescript mother and father, along with Alex's little brother Wyatt.  The ghostly visitations come once a weird neighbor kid named Robbie starts hanging around the house, with the movie springing its first effective jump scare on us as Alex and Ben go up to the tree house in the middle of the night only to find Robbie there staring into a corner.  Fairly normal behavior, if you ask me.  Robbie just moved into the neighborhood, and his mother is soon revealed to be in the hospital for some unknown reason.  I'll give you one guess as to who said mother figure is.  At any rate, Robbie is now staying with the family for a few days, which means that the plot can jump start.

There are two long-running motifs in this series.  I've brought one of them up, which is that every movie seems to have a "signature" camera shot.  This time around, it's the family living room with the lights off, dots of light illuminating the surroundings.  It's creepy and leads to a few good ghost reveals, but it's nowhere near as effective as that "oscillating fan camera" from the last one, or even the overhead kitchen shot from the second.  The other motif is that whenever the movie wants to spring a surprise on us, we have this guttural, bass-filled "rumble" that fills the soundtrack.  I remember sitting in the dark theater when I saw the first film and thinking that it really added to the atmosphere.  By this point, the shine was off and I just found it annoying.  Yet more A+ film criticism from this reporter.

What more is there to expound upon?  Well, Katie eventually reappears from the "hospital," and I have to admit that it was good to see her in a fairly regular role again.  Featherston is actually a pretty good actress, and I would certainly have liked to see her in more horror films because she has a very good, relatable quality when she's not possessed by demons.  Spoiler alert.  All throughout the film, the entity appears to have been targeting Wyatt, and I will also give it to the movie in this regard as it sprung a surprise on me when it comes to this kid that I genuinely did not see coming.  But it's kind of a sprinkle in the shit sandwich.

The reason?  This movie just isn't scary.  At all.  Maybe I'm just jaded, but I was able to call every jump, every time that a door would slowly creak open, every time a shadow would run past the camera, etc.  I'd seen this three times before.  The thrill was gone.  Without spoiling everything that happens, I'll also say that I felt extremely let down by the ending.  These days, it almost takes incredible balls for a horror movie to NOT have an open-ended final sequence, and given that this flick had the tagline "All the Activity Has Led to This," this would have been a good opportunity for the good guys to actually pull one out for a change.  Nope.  But...that probably would have led to no additional sequels, so we can't have nice things.

That's what we get with Paranormal Activity 4.  It's competent and well-produced, but with pretty much every specific it just feels there.  The acting is by and large bad, with the exception of Featherston in her brief scenes.  The kid who plays Wyatt in particular is grating to the core.  The camera gimmick feels even less believable in this one than it does in previous installments, especially in the finale.  And the plot springs that one good surprise on us, but even that isn't enough to barely lull us out of submission.  Suffice to say, I can't recommend this one.

* 1/2 out of ****.  And I realize that there are two more of these things to cover before I'm done.  But if anyone wants to call me a hypocrite for breaking my own Golden Rule of Entertainment, I say...screw it.  I spent $20 on six movies and that's a pretty damn good ratio in my book.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

2011
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Lauren Bittner, Chris Smith, Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown

So it's come to this - back to the Paranormal Activity films.

A preface:  I saw the first two films in theaters, and liked the hell out of both.  I'll never forget watching the first movie and then driving 40 miles back home in a rain storm through the middle of nowhere in rural Minnesota, my mind playing tricks on me the whole time because I'm a giant wuss.  The second one didn't have any experience that memorable, but I still enjoyed it.  The ironic thing (did I properly use the word "ironic" there?) is that if you go back to the the handy-dandy October 2010 section of this here blog and read my original review, I was already hoping that the series was over because I didn't know what else you could do with the concept.  Well, lo and behold, there's been something like 19 additional films since then.  And I kept my word and totally ignored all of them.  And there they stayed buried in my subconscious for five years...until I saw a box set of all six movies last Halloween for the low-low price of twenty bucks.  It's hard to say no to that kind of horror collection padding.  I'm just now getting around to watching them, which means...buckle up.  There is a good chance that this series of reviews is going to suck.

I say that because reviewing movies like this are a challenge.  Found footage...yeah, it's a genre that is VERY easy to get some cheap scares, but it's one of the hardest things on the planet to make feel authentic.  The $10 million question in all of these films is always the following:  WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE STILL FILMING??!?  While The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first movie done in this vein, it actually did make an attempt to explain this question and feel as authentic as possible.  The PA movies and a lot of what came after have a tendency to feel like traditional horror films shot in the first-person.  These movies also tend to be very short and minimalist, so there's only so much padding out that I can do with my writing.  I've often been accused of having diarrhea of the keyboard, but what you're about to witness is someone attempting to pull off some kind of minor miracle the likes of which Jesus himself would be damn proud of.  Is that enough introduction?  Probably too much.  Let's go.

Upon re-watching the first two films, my opinion of them is confirmed.  The first is still a damn scary time with only one dopey plot move (the demonologist who conveniently has to disappear just as the movie approaches its final trimester), and the second is a fun enough time that has the weakness of the husband character.  For the uninitiated, the two films are the stories of sisters Katie and Kristi, each of whom finding themselves dealing with a demonic presence in their house.  At the end of the first, Katie is possessed by said demon and kills her boyfriend, leading to this really nifty sequence in the second where the events sync up.  This movie explores the events where it all began...which means we're heading back to the past like the Angry Video Game Nerd.  The second movie was also a prequel.  We'll be back to horse and buggy days by the time this series is over, even though cameras hadn't been invented yet.  I'm 47% positive that this wouldn't stop any screenwriter.

So the film opens with Katie (the older sister, for those keeping score) delivering a box of old VHS tapes from their childhood to Kristi, currently pregnant with the kid who would serve as the plot lynchpin in the second movie.  This would be your epic set-up, as we're looking at the old tapes from their childhood.  Flashback to 1988, where we meet young Katie, young Kristi, and their mother Julie.  Julie is living with her boyfriend Dennis, a confirmed slacker whose job is videotaping weddings.  Oh-so-convenient for the plot, I know.  Early on in the film, Dennis talks Julie into making a sex tape, only for them to be interrupted mid-coitus by an EARTHQUAKE and the camera to catch dust falling onto an invisible person.  It actually is kind of creepy, I must admit.

Well, Dennis sees this and immediately sets up surveillance all around the house to catch the invisible intruder.  This enables Dennis to discover that Kristi's relationship with her invisible friend Toby is deeper than he initially thought; she gets up in the middle of the night and talks to him, for starters.  Seems normal to me. 

If there is one thing that the Paranormal Activity movies do well, it is set up at least one true money sequence that builds and builds and eventually explodes.  This one is no diferent, as Julie and Dennis head out for a night on the town and leave the kids in care of a babysitter.  Cue a really creepy sequence that takes the concept of the classic "sheet with two cut-out eyes" ghost and brings it to the 21st century.  I'll admit that I was biting my nails during this stuff, and it's unfortunate that the next attempted trademark scare sequence involving Dennis' Shaggy-from-Scooby Doo work partner and more earthquakes isn't anywhere near as cool.

Believe it or not, we're already something like fifty minutes into this movie, which means that it's time to wrap things up.  Dennis eventually finds a Pagan symbol in the girls' bedroom, and once the disbelieving mother has something happen directly to her, it's off to the home of the adoring grandmother.  Everything that happens from this point on is entirely predictable, and it's also where the movie feels its LEAST authentic.  Particularly in the final five minutes or so, when I was left to perform mental gymnastics at the thoughts of how and why Dennis was still recording all of this stuff.

SPOILER ALERT for anyone who doesn't want such things, so skip this paragraph if you don't want key surprising-but-not-really twists revealed.  Julie's mother, and the kids' grandmother, is actually the leader of an honest-to-goodness COVEN that has been causing all of this demonic activity.  It's probably spelled out more in further sequels, but I think the idea is that they sacrifice each family member's first-born son, which explains why the grandmother was so adamant about Julie trying for more kids and so disappointed when she announced that she was done.  It actually is kind of an interesting idea, but the second that the family shows up at grandma's house, it's projected from a mile away.

Is this movie any good?  Kind of.  For starters, the actors playing the young versions of Katie and Kristi are pretty bad.  Chris Smith is also pretty grating as Dennis.  Emotional stakes just aren't there in this movie, and it's the nature of the beast when you're dealing with prequels.  We already know how the story ends, so a lot of the suspense is kneecapped before the story even starts.  The concept had already been stretched almost as far as it could be at this point, and we're only on movie #3.  Thus, the only thing that this flick could do was craft some shocks.  There are more than a few things in this flick that will make you jump, but you know my stance on those.  You jump, you recover, and you forget aout it approximately 2.7 seconds later.  Thus, this movie wasn't my thing once the end credits rolled, but once those end credits roll it doesn't matter.  The proof?  This movie set records for highest-grossing midnight showings and opening days for a horror film.  And what that ultimately means for you saps is the aforementioned upcoming reviews.

** 1/2 out of ****.  I actually did enjoy this film while I was watching it, but not in the way that I would ever want to watch it again.  That prequel thing really does kill it.  Supposedly, though, the next film is actually a sequel to Paranormal Activity 2, and given the explanation that we get in this one, I would be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued by that prospect.  Stay tuned.  /thundercrash

Alligator (1980)

1980
Directed by Lewis Teague
Starring Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger and Henry Silva

Before I get going with this review, I'm going to pull back the curtain once again in regards to how these things are written.  I have a lot of down time at my job, and during that dead time I tend to dig out a few sheets of paper and jot down ideas for films and/or subjects to be covered here.  I was all ready to go this week with a rare non-movie review post about things that legit frighten me in real life.  Spoiler alert: I'm a huge wuss with no less than 1,478 irrational fears, many of them due to watching a lot of Unsolved Mysteries as a kid.  But I quickly noticed that there was one recurring theme on that list.  Namely, big scary animals.  I've said this before, but film-makers, take note - when you make things like spiders, snakes and large predators scary, you'll get me almost every damn time.  Except for those abominations on the SyFy channel.  F**k them.

Which brings me to alligators, crocodiles and the movie in question today.  I first saw Alligator some Saturday afternoon on one of my local channels many, many years ago, and it scared the crap out of me then.  It actually inspired me to do a lot of research into the ACTUAL subject of the urban legend that it's based on - the story of alligators living in the New York City sewers - and the truth is no less fascinating.  Google it.  The movie definitely isn't perfect, but it still holds up very well today for one simple reason: giant reptiles are friggin' scary.  I don't know exactly WHERE being eaten by a huge creature with giant teeth that can rip you to shreds within seconds ranks on the "bad death" list, but it has to be pretty high.  And the creative team behind this film - director Lewis Teague and screenwriter John Sayles - understood that and then some.  I really didn't intend this, but Sayles ALSO wrote last week's four-star classic Piranha.  He's been nominatd for Oscars since then, but to me he'll always be the king of aquatic horror, baby.  It's brie time.

While the plot of Alligator eventually does tread into some dirty territory, the thing about the presentation is that it's deadly serious and occasionally dingy.  This is readily apparent from the prologue, as a young girl buys a baby alligator while on vacation in Florida and brings it back to her home in Chicago.  The alligator is promptly flushed down the toilet by her snarling dad...and I think you know where we're going from here.  What you might NOT think is just how the baby alligator becomes the monster of this creature feature, as it spends the next several years feasting on animal carcasses deposited in the sewers by a super-mega-evil company experimenting on animals with growth formulas.  This would be the classic "derp" moment that brings us our Mrs. Deagle-esque human villain character, but we'll get to him later.  In short order, the alligator - now fully grown to Brobdingnagian proportions and boasting an insatiable appetite to go with its size - starts attacking sewer workers, and we get to meet our truly Shakespeare-worthy characters in charge of tracking it down.

And boy, what a hero character this movie has.  Folks, Alligator has Robert Forster.  I've been a huge fan of this guy ever since seeing him in Jackie Brown, and yeah, I know that it wasn't his first movie, but at the very least you can see his face and know that he's bringing the goods.  In this film, he's police officer David Madison.  John Sayles must have a real hard-on for hero characters who don't give no f**ks, because Piranha had the drunk outdoorsman guy, and David Madison is the same type of dude.  With all of the dead bodies piling up, it means that our investigator is going to need a plucky partner.  Said partner is reptile expert Marisa Kendall, played by Robin Riker.  The "derp" makes a return when we realize a very important thing - this is the same person who bought the alligator all those years ago.  Coincidence, thy name is Alligator.

So far, I'm sure that you've noticed that this film is very similar to Piranha.  Not that that's a bad thing; there's certainly not many low-budget creature features that you can choose to crib from, especially when you have the same guy behind the writer's desk.  The movie compensates by giving us - I s**t you not - a QUIRKY ROMANCE between Madison and Kendall.  This includes a scene where they visit Kendall's house, and Madison butters up to his new love interest's abrasive mother.  No joke, there's like a ten-minute subplot in the middle of this movie where it turns into your average Julia Roberts crappy rom-com flick.  Amazed, but not in the good way.

Now let's get to the creature itself.  It definitely looks cool, and the body count has already more than reached its government minimum, so we've seen it in action.  From what I can tell, the big gator was brought to life mainly through the arts of puppetry, forced-perspective photography and stop-motion animation, and there's only a couple scenes that look truly dated by today's standards.  From a "monster" standpoint, it definitely fits the bill, so three cheers for conventional special effects!

Alright, back to the show.  Thus far, all of the victims have been nameless sewer workers and other scrubs, but we need some truly sweeping emotional stakes for the second half of the film.  The first guy that we get is Slade (Dean Jagger), the businessman who was the guy in charge of all the illegal animal experiments that created the beast.  Dr. Frankenstein, this guy ain't, although it does give us a pretty satisfying kill scene later on.  There's also a lab scientist providing the injections who hilariously has his wedding invaded by the gator (not kidding, folks, it happens).  Last but certainly not least, we get the intervention of a grizzled monster hunter played by Henry Silva who is about as effective as Creighton Duke on his best day.  Not his worst day, but his best day, although that's still pretty bad.

When holding this movie side-by-side with Piranha, this one definitely treads a lot more into hokey territory.  And while that film definitely had its humorous moments, I think this one is just generally a lot more goofy in tone.  Sometimes, that works, as the movie definitely has its laughs.  But sometimes it also takes away from what should be a very freaky story.  There are few things on Earth that scare me more than these animals; I've had no less than two nightmares in the past year where I suddenly find myself in a muddy river in some remote location and know - just know - that there's a giant saltwater croc on my tail.  Then I wake up and cry.  Well, maybe not, but that 25% exaggeration serves a purpose (I think) - this movie could have been really, really scary.  And while the movie has good performances, good effects and an all-around fun pace, I can't say that I was frightened by it on this re-watch.  So, yeah, the flaws are there, but it really is hard to go too wrong with this formula.  Current film-makers, more aquatic horror, please!

As for a rating, let's give the flick *** out of ****.  Good, but not great, but it also served as the precursor to Lewis Teague's next film - the certifiably terrifying Cujo, truly one of the best movies EVER in terms of taking something ordinary and making it freaky as all get out.  But I've reviewed enough Stephen King movies on this here blog, so that one won't be coming for a while.