Filler or non-PA from the start?

I watched all six movies in a row last night and I really feel like Marked Ones is out of place. Sure, they connected it to the rest of the franchise via Ali, the ending, and the box of tapes (the last of which only served to cause confusion), but frankly, it just did not seem necessary for several reasons.

  • It was a different family, in a completely different location
  • The rest of the franchise centers around a specific handful of children with a purpose
  • The part about possessing a bunch of unconnected men did not fit with the story at all (the nonsense about their birthdays was a forced contrivance, a bad—and failed—attempt to make the story work)

The only things I can say that this installment brought to the series was the notion that witches from all around the world are conspiring together for a greater purpose (which is revealed in Ghost Dimension), and the idea of portals and time-travel (which again comes into play in GD).

But, to be honest, I suspect this was in reality just filler, a way to cash in on the franchise that year until they could knock out another movie that was actually connected to the story. Maybe like has happened with some other series (Hellraiser), they were contractually obligated to release a movie each year, so they threw this together to meet those requirements.

In fact, it occurs to me that this may not have even started out as a PA movie at all. It has happened before where they took a completely different property and retrofitted it with some franchise elements to fit/force it in. For example, Silent Hill 4: The Room and Super Mario Bros. 2 were distinctly different and drew a lot of criticism for not fitting into the franchise, but that’s only because they were never meant to be in those franchises in the first place; they started life as completely different games, that were then modified and forced in. (The whole time I was watching it, it felt more like some of the segments from the V/H/S franchise than PA.)

The more I think about this movie, the more it feels like they took some completely different found-footage movie about witches and threw in a handful of PA elements to make it fit. If so, then like I suspected, it probably was indeed just a filler for contractual purposes.




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