![]() When Anna is murdered and their friend Oscar is seen running from the scene, Jesse and Arturo break into the apartment and find a cupboard full of boxes of old videotapes, the top one conveniently marked “Katie and Kristi, 1988,” linking the events back to the characters of the first film. Recently graduated from high school, Jesse and Arturo spend their days on the streets of their town making fools of themselves, engaging in Jackass style stunts in their apartment block, playing with their dog, chasing girls, Arturo filming Jesse with an obsession which borders on the homoerotic, and harassing their elderly downstairs neighbour Anna and spying on her, lowering the camera through a ventilation shaft to unexpectedly reveal a naked girl having symbols drawn upon her flesh, possibly in blood, to their voyeuristic teenage delight. From the inevitable diminishing returns of dreariest of horror franchises, while it was anticipated that this film would be nothing other than bad, the only surprise it manages is that it is actually far worse than even the lowest expectation. Rather than using this to shift the perspective, telling a new tale through the eyes of those who have grown up in that close knit and deeply religious community where faith is a tangible daily experience, where icons decorate the walls and feature in the tattoos of gang members, instead it follows the template of found footage without inspiration or deviation, exhibiting a grudging and petulant refusal to innovate or challenge preconceptions. The only significant difference from those films is that where before the cast were primarily white and affluent, living in a suburb of large houses with multiple security cameras, The Marked Ones departs for the down and dirty streets of the Hispanic neighbourhoods of Oxnard, California. So it would seem with the inexplicably successful Paranormal Activityseries of films, with four in the main sequence and a fifth in preparation for release later in 2014, and now an official spinoff ( Tokyo Nights now disregarded as unofficial), repeating the same incidents in different variations in the manner of a child wishing to hear a favourite nursery rhyme before bed.Īt eighty four minutes, even the drive by shooting running time does the film no favours with insufficient plot to fill a third of that length, and all of it predictable, generic and derivative, most obviously from the shared bare bones of the previous films whose principal behaviour was the decidedly normal activity of treading water. ![]() Hauntings, so we are told, follow patterns, spirits repeating in death the routines of their former life.
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