Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

See, like this.

"Sequels Literally Forever"

Okay I just made that up, but there was no actual tagline. So sue me! Hello friends, welcome to another fine Thursday at The Tagline, where I babble about movies and you continue to fail to voice increasing suspicions that I may actually be losing my mind. I know I promised you bad bad turtles, but I thought I'd save that good shit for next week, and so instead you'll be getting horror sequel part 100, with Paranormal Activity: THE MARKED ONES. Though really I think I definitely prefer "Actividad Paranormal: Los Marcados" as a title. Anyway, this... fifth film in the series is technically a spinoff, so characters from the other movies only make brief cameos (mostly just Katie Featherston, who is the only one to have appeared in every instance of the franchise). The movie follows recent high school graduate Jesse, and his two friends Marisol and Hector, as they are first messing around with a camera and decide to see what sorts of weird shit their downstairs neighbor Ana is getting up to. Everyone thinks she's a witch and SURPRISE she totally is a goddamned witch. If I've learned anything about California from these movies, it's that the female population there is at least like 25% witches and demon worshipers. Anyway, Ana winds up murdered, presumably by a classmate of Jesse's and then stuff starts getting weird around Jesse's house. He acquires some neat magic tricks, and the trio slowly come to realize that this new juice Jesse has going for him is coming from something that seems to be hanging around with him, following him and communicating its displeasure through a Simon (you know the light up game thing). This movie offers a lot of object lessons for the audience, and I will enumerate them as I go further into my thoughts on the movie.

What nice sisters they are!

For starters, I always suspected that Simon was an evil device created by the devil, but now I have concrete proof of it. People said I was crazy, and I was banned from Toys R'Us but now I think we all can see that I was wasn't the crazy one after all was I?! Uh... anyway, Jesse starts to get even weirder than that stuff I just said, and through some creepy book that they find in Ana's house they determine that Jesse was marked from birth to become a vessel for a demon. Now I'm not sure why you'd want to deliberately summon one of these goddamned things, even if you were an evil devil worshiper, seeing as the only thing they like to do as near as I can tell is tear people to pieces and do freaky supernatural shit to them. Maybe the witches are possessed too though so they're down with that I don't know. At any rate, Jesse and his friends commit increasingly desperate acts in an attempt to prevent the finalization of the possession. This includes Jesse's abuela using her spooky catholic santaria to try and exorcise the demon out of Jesse, which seems as it often does to succeed only in making the demon super pissed. Good try though abuela, you did your best, and tried to warn them not to speak to the devil through that Simon.

God, to live a full life having never seen shit like this.

Here's another free piece of advice. No matter how sexy a time you had at that super cool party, it is never a good idea to try and hook up in the abandoned apartment of a dead witch, or anyone else for that matter! It is a good idea to try and have sex in an abandoned building I would say exactly 0% of the time. I have never watched a film where some teens snuck off into a spooky abandoned building, got busy in some empty room, and then Megan Fox did not EAT THE GUY ALIVE IN A NOT SEX WAY. Also if you were in an empty room, of an apartment of a dead woman, at night, alone, and a mysterious trap door popped ITSELF open, would you lean over the opening and just like, stick your head down there? If you answered yes, then nothing will happen in this movie that you don't approve of. Everyone will behave in a manner that you find appropriate, and will die just like you've no doubt always dreamed of.

Man, he needs to stop throwing tantrums and grow up.

The final lesson we learn, and at great cost to one of our main characters, is that if you see a scary weird door with freaky runes on it, don't go through the door. It is not a magical portal to safety. It is a magical portal to the opposite of safety. You know this for sure because of the fucked up pentagrams and stuff covering the frame of it. Hector unfortunately works this lesson out a little late. That's not really his fault though, because he was just trying to get away from demons and scary witch cultists and stuff, and who can fault a guy for that.

While there are only so many movies you can watch about having a camera while the devil torments you in your bedroom (it's different when you're lost under Paris honest!) this movie has a bit of a different atmosphere and setup than the other Paranormal Activity films, and managed to be a lot fresher than say PA4, which I found to be thoroughly not interesting. This movie of course lacks the pure horror of the original, but it is still freaky, and entertaining. That's good enough for a Netflix watch. For the record they are planning a REAL Paranormal Activity 5 so... I guess look out for that. That's it for today, join me again next week for turtles. Honest.