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.
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