Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and Hector (Jorge Diaz) are best pals who have just graduated from high school but who haven't given a single thought to the future. ![]() While it's a drag that studios - in this case, Paramount - think about putting anyone other than affluent white suburbanites onscreen only when there are dollars to be made, the first half of The Marked Ones is lively enough, and funny enough, to work on its own merits. Actually, The Marked Ones has been conceived more as a spinoff of the series rather than a bona fide entry it's aimed largely at Latino moviegoers, who apparently make up a large portion of the Paranormal Activity fan base. This is the latest installment in the franchise that nobody claims to care about anymore but still somehow causes dollars to flow almost paranormally out of moviegoers' pockets. They're equal-opportunity squatters, squeezing themselves into even the smallest space.īut if The Marked Ones is mildly brilliant in the first half, it stumbles witlessly into its own dumb pentagram in the second. In this setting, one in which people literally live on top of one another and not a winding driveway's worth of real estate away, there really is something insidious about the presence of demons. Rosemary's Baby notwithstanding, it's usually only white suburban people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons - they're always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn't be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat's blood, and wondering aloud, "You think this is some sort of devil-worship thing?" That's why it was a stroke of genius to set Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones in Oxnard, California, in a semi-urban Latino neighborhood, a place where multiple generations of family often live under the same roof, where your neighbors are so close, you can hear them through the vents in your bedroom.
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