Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

A noble (yet failed) attempt to shake up the Paranormal Activity series, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones follows recent high-school graduate Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) as he discovers a mysterious bite on his arm and subsequently begins to experience odd changes to his personality. It’s inevitably clear that Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones bears few similarities to its four predecessors in terms of structure, as filmmaker Christopher Landon eschews the format (“Night 1,” Night 2,” etc) of those movies in favor of a far more generic found-footage sort of feel. The less-than-engrossing atmosphere is, at the outset, compounded by an emphasis on the uninvolving exploits of the central character, with the first third of the movie devoted to Jesse’s fun-loving antics in and around his low-rent apartment building alongside friends Hector (Jorge Diaz) and Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh). Landon’s excessively deliberate sensibilities result in a first half that’s almost entirely devoid of compelling interludes, and it’s not until the film trudges into its comparatively engrossing midsection that one’s interest is finally piqued to a slight degree. (It doesn’t hurt that Landon has peppered this section of the proceedings with a handful of admittedly engaging sequences, including an ominous game of Simon and Jesse’s encounter with several creepy figures.) The palpable lack of momentum, coupled with an incongruously unpleasant bit of business involving Jesse’s dog, ensures that Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones fizzles out considerably in the buildup to its familiar climax (ie it’s awfully similar to its immediate predecessor’s final stretch), with the intriguing yet baffling coda confirming the movie’s place as a demonstrably needless entry within a progressively irrelevant series.

** out of ****