(This review may contain spoilers).
By now, I’ve seen, I think, almost all of the Paranormal Activity movies. Although they are cliched and it’s easy to tell what’s going to happen by the end, I did think this was an acceptable addition to the franchise.
It was interesting to see the tie-ins to the previous movies and Christie and Katie were really creepy on the tapes… though I felt that the movies shown with them in kind of contradicted their movies; or that there wasn’t enough detail about how things changed so abruptly.
There was a bit more explanation about the cult in this movie, rather than just having the women appear randomly. Although it does tie in with Katie and Christie’s storyline, I’m still confused about how The Marked Ones fits into the franchise.
Although there were some jumpy moments in this movie, I actually found myself desensitized to them. And a lot of the really jumpy moments were shown in the trailer.
It was interesting to see Toby as an actual entity, rather than invisible to all but the children. I thought Leila was cute at first… but she suffered from Creepy Child Syndrome very quickly. (If you don’t know what I mean by that… the Ring and The Grudge are good examples).
While there were some tense scenes in this movie, there were times I felt like I was just waiting for the inevitable conclusion. This film wasn’t actually that different from the others… though there was a bit more gore involved. The camera angles and night vision allowed for the violence to not be as obvious, though, which left a lot to the imagination.
I did get confused between Leila’s father and his brother for a while, due to not actually seeing much of either of them at first. There were some good comedy elements through the movie and although there were parts I felt dragged a little, it was entertaining to watch. I wouldn’t watch it again any time soon… but it was entertaining enough to see once.
Ink of Blood 