Review of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) by Filipeneto — 14 Feb 2020

This film is the fifth in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise. It's a spinn-off which tells the story of Jesse, a young man who ends up being a victim of the witch society to which belonged the grandparents of Katie and Kristi, main characters in the initial films.

I confess that I expected worse. The story is not as bad as I thought it would be and has its moments and some tension. However, there are continuity flaws, lack of logic and several inconsistencies. The scares, in turn, are excessively predictable. The biggest problem is that it does not present anything really new, in a kind of film whose recipe has come to wear out very quickly. Something I felt was an attempt to moderate the dead moments, one of the most tangible problems in previous films. An effort was also made to make a shorter film, where the pace of events was faster. This was a positive development.

The cast is, for me, a group of illustrious strangers, in that I have never seen any of them in other works or, if I did, they went completely unnoticed by my eyes. It is not the kind of film we see for the brilliance of its actors, and thankfully ... the cast does what it needs to do but does not shine, nor does it have the material or direction that allows it.

Personally, I feel that this film is quite warm: it is not bad enough to hate but it is also far from good. It suffers from many of the endemic problems in the franchise, but there is an effort to alleviate some of the most criticized points in previous films.