The paranormal sure is starting to look familiar.
‘The Marked Ones’, a Paranormal Activity spin-off, swaps the franchise’s suburban setting for Los Angeles’ roughed-up outer limits, but the procession of demonic hauntings faced by Latin American high school graduates Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and Hector (Jorge Diaz) is business as usual.
There are sub-bass growls, ganglands, apparitions and trapdoor basements; some jolting, some hard to discern for paranormal activity or a regular night in the Bronx. Hector records all of his and Jesse’s bro-hood shenanigans on a GoPro camera that, despite the found footage conceit, must have made it to the editing room given the truckload of jump cuts in this movie. And boy, $300 sure buys a lot of good audio quality these days.
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As far as I can tell, Hector spends most of the movie with the camera strapped to his head, which is unfortunate because he’s one of those people who voices his every thought. Thankfully there are HDMI cables that let you slide the camera between the paper-thin walls of Jesse’s grandmother’s apartment and spy on your de-robed neighbour, Anna, which is exactly what Jesse and Hector are doing when her dealings turn out to be less-than-neighbourly. She’s found dead a few days later, and their eerie high school colleague Oscar (Carlos Pratts) is thought to be responsible.
Where this instalment’s change of milieu might’ve made for an interesting socio-economic allegory a la ‘Candyman’, it plays out like a checklist of Latin American stereotypes. A tortilla! A dancing chihuahua! A superstitious Latina grandmother, drunk on tequila! We’re not in middle-class suburbia anymore, gringo.
Inevitably, the most interesting change is that ‘The Marked Ones’ isn’t a whole lot different to the movies that actively ridicule the franchise, like ‘A Haunted House’ or ‘Scary Movie V’. The demon in this one uses a musical children’s toy as its Ouija board. It’s genuinely hard to tell if the movie is winking at how tired the whole franchise is. It’s not long until Jesse’s sanctity takes a turn for the worst, and a few scary sequences will have you looking away from the screen. Apart from that, these films are horror genre poison, all cheap scares and barrel-scraping attempts at suspsense. The most paranormal activity is that they’re still being made.
