Pair of Marked Ones

Ms. Spenser is a big fan of horror, but has fairly particular tastes. We watched Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) because she finds the PA movie series to be reliably entertaining. I rather liked this entry too - while not endorsing the series in general, mind you.

As with all entries, this is done entirely "found footage" style. We meet three friends, Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, and Gabrielle Walsh, as they are graduating from high school. Jacobs is the dark, brooding one, Diaz the dopey friend, and Walsh, the hot girl who's just one of the boys. Jacobs (and Diaz?) lives in a slightly crumby apartment built around a courtyard in a Hispanic neighborhood in LA (Oxnard, I guess). We get some home movies of him goofing around, but significantly of the creepy crazy lady who lives in a downstairs apartment. When they taunt her, she mutters, "You have no idea what's going to happen to you."

She turns up murdered, and they spot a fellow student running from the back of the apartment. Instead of telling the police (snitched get stitches), they investigate the apartment and find all kinds of evidence of witchcraft. They take a book of spells, and try out a summoning in the abandoned church across the street. The results are scary, but inconclusive. Later, when they are playing with a Simon electronic game, it starts answering Jacobs' questions like a Ouija board. Except the question: "Are you good?"

Jacobs starts showing weird symptoms, like a bite mark. When he gets mugged, he turns out to have super-strength and just tosses the thugs around. But he is also having dark moods, and beats up a kid for talking to Walsh. I don't think he considers using his powers for good.

I won't go into the last act: suffice it to say that it ties into the whole mythos, with the first 2-3 movies referenced (we see Jacobs doing the haunting from the first movie. The last part of these movies always seems to me to be the scariest and the most random. So it is here.

But I do want to say that I liked the way this was not about rich white people. It's not super-ghetto, but about young adults living less than perfect lives. My only problem (other than not getting what was going on at all times) is that Grandma Irma wasn't able to stem this possession. Sure, she wiped some vinegar around, but couldn't do what nanny Diaz did in PA2. I guess she didn't succeed either.