It’s June in Oxnard, California, and cheerfully unemployed best friends
and neighbours Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and Hector (Jorge Diaz) ease into their
first post-graduation summer. These guys don’t fret much over having nothing to
do. Jesse gets his hands on a GoPro, which he uses to document tequila shots
with his abuelita, dancing with Chavo, his pet Chihuahua, and convincing Hector
to do idiotic stunts like hurl himself down the stairs of their two-story
walk-up in a rubber storage container. When asked how it feels to be out of
high school, Jesse replies, “I feel like
a man now.”
When a shut-in in their building is killed in her own
apartment and their class valedictorian is fingered as prime suspect, Jesse and
Hector decide to do a little private investigating—it’s not like cops spend
much time in their neighbourhood anyway, and a few hits from the bong is all it
takes to turn these guys into Shaggy and Scooby Doo. They break into the
victim’s home, which seems long abandoned: everything’s covered in dust,
including a huge collection of VHS tapes and a nursery. But wait, the dead lady
didn’t have any children. Hmm…
The next morning Jesse wakes
up to find that not only has Hector drawn a dick on his face in magic marker,
but there’s also a inexplicable circular mark on his arm. Soon after he’s using
an old electronic Simon game as a Ouija board, and soon after that he begins to sense that he has superpowers,
or maybe a guardian angel! Rather than fight crime, consult a parapsychologist
or report to the FBI, Jesse opts to laugh himself silly doing trust exercises
and blowing up an inflatable mattress really
fast on camera—which he and Hector immediately put online and await approving
comments. All of this is pretty hilarious. Think of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones as a genre/sociological
experiment: What happens when you put teenage Chicanos who live in walk-ups
into an otherwise garden variety American horror story? You get comedy. Or
anyway, half a comedy. I wish it stayed a comedy.
Watching The Marked
Ones, which was written and directed by PA
2 and 3 helmer Christopher
Landon, you begin to realize just how rare genuine ethnicity—not to mention
class diversity—is in American horror, which is nearly always about white
people and their token black/Asian/Hispanic pals. A veneer of normalcy is essential
to most horror stories, but it seems that Landon or someone else overseeing the
PA franchise finally clued into the
fact that the American normal has shifted since Amityville. To be sure, The
Marked Ones capitalizes on racial or class stereotypes, but this is (half-)
comedy, and comedy is partially dependent on the shared recognition of such
stereotypes, and I’d argue that the film doesn’t do so at the expense of its
characters.
Now about that other half. As
The Marked Ones burrows deeper into
its not-very-mysterious mystery, the hi-jinx largely fall away and the humdrum
boo moments accumulate. A conspiracy is uncovered. “He said they’re witches
trying to build an army or some shit,” says the MIA valedictorian killer’s
gansta brother. Where the movie was previously ridiculous in a good way, it
soon just gets really dumb. There’s too much pointless exposition, the car
won’t start, and no matter how much hair-raising mayhem unfolds, the camera, of
course, always stays on and, miraculously, is always pointed in the right
direction. At least the final moments forge a connection to the rest of the PA mythology that’s so absurd you have
to laugh. And the audience I saw it with did laugh—a lot. They knew exactly
what kind of movie they wanted this to be.
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