Paranormal Activity - The Marked Ones

Marking Bad

Paranormal Activity - The Marked Ones

2014 USA

Directed by Christopher Landon

Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: There will be some spoilers in here.

Okay... so if you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ll probably know that I adore the Paranormal Activity films, at least the ones which were made in the USA... I’ve not been able to get a subtitled copy of the Japanese sequel to the original movie, Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night due to, presumably, the Hollywood studios suppressing a release in English speaking countries (I can only, at time of writing this article, track down versions with Italian or French subtitles... so please let me know if you have any leads to picking up a decent, English subtitled DVD of the same).

This sixth (depending on how you choose to count them) entry into the series is a sideways swipe of a movie, shot as a fill in to bridge the release gap between Paranormal Activity 4 and the next one in the series, erm, Paranormal Activity 5... although my understanding is that Paranormal Activity 5 was done and in the can before this one was even made. Is that correct? Maybe the producers don’t have much confidence in it.

Anyway, up until now, although I loved the first in the series... I always considered that movie to be the weakest of the films, not because it wasn’t any good - it was. It’s just that the first one wasn’t scary like the other ones turned out to be. However, now I’ve seen this installment, I’d have to say that this is now my least favourite of the series, not because it isn’t scary... it really is. Scary as hell. The usual high blood pressure and heart attack inducing shenanigans ensue, especially if you are going to see this in the company of a young, impressionable audience at the cinema. However... I did have some really big problems with this movie too.

My biggest problem, though, is that I didn’t sympathise with any of the main protagonists of the movie and, frankly, I didn’t care what happened to them. One of the two main guys is fresh from his College graduation and, frankly, I just assumed that a lot of his time before the spooky goings on were happening, and all through the film, would be about getting himself a job and becoming an upstanding, working citizen.

Nope.

He and his friends are just, basically, thugs. Lazy teenagers who just seem to think its fine loafing around, acting goofy, playing mean pranks and doing nothing to help themselves. Seriously, this lot are worse than the kids in Attack the Block but, whereas in that film the issues inherent in the chemical make up of the so-called “heroes” was addressed at various times in the movie, here it’s just accepted that these are typical teenagers somehow... and presumably the film’s primary target audience of cinemagoing teenagers is supposed to identify with them. Lord help us if they do!

Another big problem is that the found footage style of film-making, which has served the series so well right from the start of the franchise (before they even figured out this would be scary, cheap and profitable enough to be a franchise) is adhered to as it should be... but with absolutely no apparent reason for this to be the case. Seriously, at least the other films in the franchise made a passable effort to justify the use of found footage media. Using surveillance cameras and switching to different sources to build a picture where the use of video of camera equipment would be justified. Here the main protagonists don’t even have a camera fetish like a couple of the characters in the past films. Here they just seem to be intent on recording stuff when they obviously are not interested in the camera in the slightest and will even remember to pick up the camera when they are running for their lives.

Seriously? The producers expect us to believe this?

The actions by various characters in this film defy credibility and that means I didn’t buy into it the way I would in a film where that layer of super-realism was deliberately used. I would have thought this is something the film-makers would have realised. The [REC] films abandoned this style a little way in to the third entry in that series and, although I didn’t agree with that departure from the format myself, if the writers couldn’t have written what they wanted to show credibly within that found footage format then you can see why they decided to rid themselves of those shackles. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is a good film to use as an example of why you wouldn’t continue with that format if you can’t write convincingly for it.

There are some good moments in this one though. The scenes where the old hand held electronic game Simon, which was popular for a year or two in the late 1970s, is used as a variation of a ouija board, is fun but, this also brings problems of its own. If this film is aimed at teenagers, and I’m pretty sure it is, they’re probably not going to remember an old toy which was briefly popular nearly 40 years ago. So... nice idea but maybe a little too low tech for the teenage audience Hollywood producers tend to target.

There are also a fair few cameos from previous episodes in the series, which is nice, including the surviving daughter from Paranormal Activity 2 and, most interestingly, Katie (a regular character in all the US installments in the franchise) and Micah, her husband who was killed at the end of the first film.

Wait? What?

The film is set in 2012... so how does this happen?

Well, if you’re paying attention during one of the “young thugs doing research” sequences of this one, you will hear references to time travel, when talking about the demon spirits and, presumably, the witch army we have seen the coven recruiting for in previous episodes. And, yeah, there’s a sequence right at the end of this one which dovetails straight into the first movie, via time travel. And I have to say that this is the tackiest writing choice I have seen in the franchise. Also a self defeating one because, if you’re building a demon army, you might as well do it in the past and there you go, it’s already done before you know it. Yeah, I know. First born sons etc need to be waited for... but then they can be whisked back in time and still exist then, I would guess... whether they were born or not. In fact, if that’s the case then the demons already know the outcome of their work, surely? It’s all very confusing and I think this element is something which is going to trip the franchise up later on down the line. But they’ve committed to it now so there’s not much anyone can do about it. Kind of a hard element to overlook in the grand scheme of things.

And that’s about it as far as Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones goes. As you would expect, the film is well acted by all the performers. Yes, acting really unsympathetically most of the time but at least you can kinda believe in them. I do think the franchise has taken a bad step with this one though. Of course, if you’re into these films, you really do need to see this one as it’s another jigsaw piece of the overall story... but I’m hoping the next one is better than this mess of a movie. The first “not so good” entry in the series.

Paranormal Activity 4

Night Of The Hunter

Paranormal Activity 4
US 2012
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Very light spoilers, almost non-spoilers, 
lurking in the background details...

Well... another Halloween, another Paranormal Activity movie.

Which is not a bad thing.

I’ve actually got a lot of respect for these “nicely done” little scary movies as you’ll know if you’ve read my reviews of the previous three here, here  and here. Ultimately, I didn’t think the first movie was scary... but the audience obviously did and, scary or not, I thought it was neatly done. The second and third movies I found very scary and also thought they carried on the magic as a franchise pretty well.

This fourth one is not so scary as the last two, but it still quite pant-wetting in places and so I still rate the fourth film a little higher than the first. Ultimately, though, I don’t think it’s quite as well done as the previous installments and I’ll get to why that is a little later. However, it does have a really neat little twist about two thirds of the way through which upends your assumptions (assumptions carefully cultivated by both the trailer and the opening of this film) which scored big points with me because, well, I’d been taken in by my own expectations and for a movie to fool me like that... that’s kinda cool.

I think a few people have mentioned that there’s a twist in it and, without giving away what that twist is, its introduced in quite a low key way (the characters in the film have no idea there is a twist happening because they’ve not seen the previous movies) but which will instantly explain why the events happening in this film are occurring with a family we’ve never even met before. It will also change what you know about one of the characters... but that’s all I’m saying on that part of the story element.

It’s a jumpy film in places but it’s not as 'skillfully scary' as the last two in the franchise, even though it’s trying to be really smart with some of its set ups. For example, in the third movie I pointed out that we all know right from a particular gadget’s first appearance, why a camera has been fitted to a fan. We know the kind of “reveal” games the director wants to play and this is indeed what happens... but I also noted that, even though we could see the mechanism and it clearly foreshadowed the action, the scares were still pretty awesome.

In this one, there’s absolutely no reason for the characters to be walking around with cameras for the first 20 minutes or so... I feel this is a big weakness in the opening of the film. I’m sorry but... teenagers don’t all go around obsessively filming absolutely everything and never taking away their cameras from their faces, right? I understand the skype stuff, so I’m not talking about that, but it just seems a bit weird because the characters have no reason, for a while, to be doing this... as opposed to the characters in the first three movies, in which case it was understandable. However, 20 minutes or so into this movie, that particular weakness in the script is taken care of by having a set of “spy cams” installed at various locations around the house. Which, in turn, leads (eventually) to my point about why the movie isn’t as skillfully done as the original...

 The film-makers have learned from their foreshadowing errors in the third film but the way they’ve responded here is, perhaps, to overthink it a little. What they do is deliberately tip-their-hats again by showing us opportunities for where pop up scares can be... a fridge door when opened obscures the camera vision, for example, and you are just waiting for it to shut and 'reveal'... but mostly this and similar setups are not really picked up on. So in a way it’s still a bit of a win situation, because you are overly anxious and worrying about when certain things are going to happen whenever you see a particular set-up... but ultimately it’s a bit of an anticlimax because the alternate shock moments they use to counter these expectations aren’t, in about half the cases, as scary as the much anticipated scare moment might have been.

Another slightly fumbled moment, and I don’t want to give too much away here, is when a piece of kitchen cutlery goes missing in a pretty overtly supernatural manner, which the audience is in on but the characters aren’t. You are left waiting for the expected consequence of this scene and the writers smartly go away from this element of the plot for a while and try to distract you with other things. The trouble is, you just don’t forget this little 'party trick' so easily, so when the pay off comes... you are expecting it and, frankly, imagining far worse than what you actually get delivered. I think it would have worked better if enough time had gone by within the movie’s running length to let the audience properly forget about this... ahem... missing item. This didn’t work nearly as well as it should here. Like a bad comedian... the timing was just off.

Similarly, the trailer for this film, like the trailer for the third installment, is made from footage which isn’t in the actual movie... although this one could at least have genuinely been slotted into the running time is my feeling (which wouldn’t have worked in the case of the trailer to the third movie). I was annoyed about this because, frankly, the trailer is quite creepy... and it also helps set up your preconceptions so the twist that comes later is able to work. It’s pretty much a variant on the uneasy original teaser trailer to the 2006 remake of The Omen... which also didn’t make it into that movie, as far as I can remember.

Another weak point is the fact that when stuff really starts happening properly, and if you’ve ever seen any of these movies you’ll know exactly what I mean (when weird stuff gets real), neither of the two teenage characters who can access the spy footage they’ve set up for just this purpose actually bothers to check what crazy stuff has been happening in their absence. There’s one scene in particular when one of the characters takes part in 'an episode' through which she sleeps. Honestly, if she’d actually played back the footage, she would have been out of that house for good... but she doesn’t. This seems somewhat strange and contrived, to be honest.

The ending sequence, too, is another sore point for me. Although it contains some nice effects, it just feels too similar to the ending of the third movie... just not quite as scary. I was hoping for something a little more interesting, if truth be told.

So yeah, there were a lot of elements that didn’t work for me here.

However, it’s still a pretty good movie and it’s a genuine sequel to both the ending of the second movie (where Katie zaps her sister and walks off with little Hunter) and the background history of a witches coven who are in cahoots with the demonic ‘Toby’ from all the installments in series so far.

And for all those ingredients which didn’t quite mix as well as I would like, it has to be said that there’s also some really nice things which do work in this movie. It’s still a little scary, for one, and it did elicit the usual “so silent in the cinema you could hear a pin drop” reaction juxtaposed with the “scream out loud and then, possibly, giggle a little to offset that” reaction from the audience I was with... which is to be applauded.

Also, the more blatant of the CGI effects used in this one... that is to say, not the ones that hide all the wirework and stuff... are actually quite special. The demonic faces you will see in this one work really well and are pretty much an extension of what they started doing in the last two... but much, much more menacing. It all works so well and the second reference I spotted in the movie to Kubrik’s version of The Shining (the first being an incident involving a kid riding a mini pedal bike around the house), when a demonised version of one of the characters chases the person who we’ve come to think of as our main protagonist and gets stuck halfway through the splintered door frame like Jack Nicholson peering through... is really a great visual moment of the series. It’s just a shame they didn’t linger on it for a little longer... but by that point in the movie everything is ramped up way past eleven. It’s definitely something I would like to see a ‘still photograph’ of, though.

So yeah, ultimately, I think I’d recommend this film to most people. I wouldnt make it the first one you see in the series, by any means, but if you’re a fan of the first three movies, while you may find it just a ‘touch’ disappointing in direct comparison, you should still have a good time with it and it certainly doesn’t tarnish the good work done in the first three. And, yes, I am looking forward to their being a fifth one for release for next year’s Halloween run up. I want to see what Katie did next!