It's a welcome update, qualifying as the best in the series since the first film captivated and unnerved audiences in 2007.

The Marked Ones is refreshingly uncynical and straightforward in its desire to simply be a movie that makes the audience jump and be scared. It's a fun fright film and wants to be nothing more.

The script succeeds by expanding the Paranormal Activity mythology with additional details and even a few surprising twists.

The haunted house setpieces provide reliable doses of jolts, even if one can see the scaffolding of each scare being built from miles away, and director Landon has fun with some clever camera placement here and there.

As exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.

The shocks are no less effective than the ones in the other Paranormal Activity movies, but no more original, either, with only the whipping of a handheld camera to set it apart from the offscreen gamesmanship that’s long been the series’ stock in trade.

This entry has been described as a “cousin” to the other movies. Specifically, The Marked Ones is a Hispanic cousin, customized for Latino audiences in the United States where the series is particularly popular.

For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.

Does anybody really find this crap scary anymore?

Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.