Tim Langford

Casey and I tried to watch the infamous Japanese horror film House (a wild and weird, borderline psychedelic fever dream) but failed to plug into it, so we switched to this film at the opposite end of the formalist spectrum. I had heard this was an underrated entry in the series, and I love the first three. Some horror franchises go to space; others go Latino.  The Marked Ones is unlike many found footage films in that its best moments occur during the often-obligatory "slice-of-life" set-up in the first act, where we are easily endeared to the characters and community. Chalk that up to great acting and an inspired choice of setting. The second act adds interesting plot devices, some being genre staples (like eerily-behaving children's toys) and others being more genre-bending. Unfortunately, the third act misses the mark, boasting a been-there-done-that horror setpiece and a truly sinful bit of retconning that actively lowers my appreciation of the previous films, specifically the first one. Abrupt found-footage endings work best when they are viscerally disturbing and visually horrifying, capable of generating nightmares with relative ease. Sadly, after The Marked Ones, I slept great.

The storytelling is quite poor, but the filmmaking is....(link) Deliciously MEAN and impressively brutal, even by the standards set from the previous two. There are a handful of incredibly visceral long-takes that should earn the director a blank check. Elsewhere, the movie pauses to drop a cold-blooded shock with a devilish smirk. It's a shame, then, that the characters and story are aggressively mid. A clichéd opening scene set at a club with hackneyed conflicts and heavy-handed dialogue portended a 3.5 star ceiling for the film, despite it succeeding at nearly every other Evil Dead expectation.  I recommend it for the scare scenes and violence, but the only thing you'll remember from it after a couple of days is a vague sense of fucked-up-ness.

Good time 👍 if a bit fleeting. It does the adapting part incredibly well, though perhaps the monsters were a touch too tentacle-y. From the macro to the micro, there’s a strong grasp of the RE video game franchise and the unique geometry of most video game stories.  However, if you’re going to honor The Thing so doggedly, don’t dishonor it with CGI blankets over every potentially practical effect. That’s the wrong Thing! Austin Abrams is your favorite hot rodent actor’s favorite hot rodent actor. He nails all of the necessary emotions. Not quite Weapons-grade, but great nonetheless.  Another 3.5 for Cregger. Almost there, always just a hair short of fireworks. His poor wife.

A true patience-tester, even for proud dumpster divers. There are 2-3 fun FX moments, but most are pretty cheap. The plot is the most basic of basic (Night of the Demons is the exact same thing but better), and it’s far too chaste for a midnight romp.  Pretty wild how they made literally 100s of these, all striving for a sort of bad, backwards magic, and only about five of them found it.