A silly wish, but it’s a testament to the talents of these young actors, and, maybe, director Christopher Landon’s facility with them. Seriously, maybe there should be a spin-off franchise: Normal Activity. (After all, their tough neighborhood is scary enough what’s a body-snatching demon or two?) Stereotypes abound, of course, but there’s still an ease to the performances that makes you wish at times that the film just abandoned the horror element altogether and spent some time with these folks. This time, instead of irritatingly disbelieving suburban-middle-class types, we have working-class Mexican-American characters who are somehow both credulous and foolhardy: They’re willing to believe in witches and ghosts and crazy goings-on, and they’re equally willing to go wandering in abandoned apartments where murders have just been committed. Stylistic borrowings aside, it’s initially an interesting twist to the usual Paranormal Activity template. But foul deeds are afoot elsewhere in their building, as evidenced by the creepy goings-on around an odd, quietly cranky neighbor Anna (Gloria Sandoval), who has already earned the nickname bruja (witch) from the local kids. We watch the two buds goof around with Jesse’s dog, we see them ride a laundry basket down the stairs, we see them do tequila shots with Jesse’s grandmother. We open on Graduation Day at the local high school, and see Hector (Jorge Diaz) and his best friend Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) fooling around with their new camera.
Still, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones does depart from the typically bland McMansions of the earlier films and places us in a slightly more promising and alive milieu: a two-story apartment complex in a Mexican-American corner of Oxnard, California. This time out, instead of unfolding via homemade surveillance footage or via laptop cameras that have been conveniently left on, the gimmick is your usual guys-constantly-carrying-a-camera-around setup. The found-footage style of filmmaking has become so played out that the Paranormal Activity series’ most recent attempt at reinvention comes off as a different kind of rehash – of The Blair Witch Project, Chronicle, Project X, and an assortment of other films that weren’t all that original to begin with.
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