- Directed by Christopher Landon
- Written by Christopher Landon, Oren Peli
- Stars Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, Gabrielle Walsh
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 24 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccE9LeAbPU4
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This one was a step up from the previous three sequels. There were good characters to care about. More interesting things happen in the light of day without the interminable nighttime shots of empty rooms and people sleeping at night that were heavily used in the others. The effects were excellent. We’d call it the best of them since the original.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open up to a bunch of people at a high school graduation. Afterward, there’s a party. Jesse sees a friend’s video camera and rushes right out to buy his own the next day; the guy throws in a GoPro to go with it. He wanders around recording everything, and introducing the characters in the process. He and his father share a room and live with his grandma. He soon accidentally records some drug dealers, and that goes badly. Other stupid stunts quickly follow.
They catch Oscar coming out of crazy neighbor Ana’s apartment. They often hear weird wailing and screams from Ana’s place late at night. It’s not sex. Jesse decides to feed his GoPro through the vent to record what’s going on over there. They see a naked woman just standing there until Ana starts putting paint on her. The neighbors think she’s a bruja.
The police start chasing Oscar when he leaves Ana’s apartment again; Ana is dead. Later, the guys all get high and decide it would be fun to break into Ana’s place and see what they can find. They hear a baby crying and search for it, but all they find is a bunch of videotapes; one of them is “Katie and Kristi, 1988.” Then they find the obvious crime scene and a journal, which they take.
They read in the book about making a time-portal to unholy places, and they get right to work on trying that. Jesse, Hector, and Marisol work on drawing the symbols and runes on the ground inside an old church, and they use a black-painted mirror as the portal. Nothing happens, so Hector leaves. They look for him, get a quick scare, and run away.
In the morning, Jesse wakes up with bite marks on his arm, and his little dog growls at him. For some reason, they start talking to an old “Simon” game that starts answering their questions. Grandma doesn’t like it; it’s evil. Afterward, Jesse starts feeling like there’s something in his house.
The guys go to play basketball, and two hoods try to rob them, but something knocks the crooks away. They ask the Simon game, and whoever is running that admits they beat up the bad guys. The next day, Jesse is doing all kinds of new “tricks” with his ghost friend.
Hector and Jesse go to a party and make new girlfriends, whom they bring home for sex. That goes really badly when Oscar shows up, hiding in a trap door under the floor. “She put it inside me. That’s why I killed Ana.” He has a bite mark on his arm just like Jesse’s. “You have to kill yourself before you hurt someone.” Oscar then jumps off the roof to his death.
The group checks out under the trap door and finds photos of Jesse, Oscar, and Ana, along with Jesse’s long-dead mother. Not long after, Jesse finds long hairs growing out of his eyes. What’s that all about? They go to talk to Oscar’s brother, who says Oscar started acting weird about a month ago. “A bunch of witches were trying to raise an army of some kind.” Both Oscar and Jesse’s mothers died giving birth.
Jesse picks a fight with a guy at the store. Later, he talks about losing time and not being able to control himself. Simon says it won’t leave him alone. Jesse and his little dog encounter some nastiness back in the trapdoor area again.
Hector and Marisol can see changes in Jesse, and they call Ali, who explains about the symbols and about the coven. Marisol takes Grandma to the local religion store, and it’s quite a place. They do a ritual to “restore” Jesse, which results in some very strange things.
The next morning, Jesse pushes Grandma down the steps, and Hector sees what happened. Ali tells Marisol where to find Jesse and the coven. There’s a quick fight, a traffic accident, and a kidnapping all within about a minute. They enlist Oscar’s brother, who’s a gang leader, to help them get Jesse back from the coven.
The group soon finds themselves under attack from the witches. They kill Marisol and chase Hector all over the place. When Hector finds one of those magic portals to a bad place, it looks very familiar.
Commentary
There’s only a quick name-drop to connect this story to the previous ones in the series until the very end, which is a good thing; that story was worn out; it looks like all they kept was the idea of the coven. This one doesn’t have the long, lingering shots of nothing, but it does have a lot of video of the guys just goofing around and strangeness going on. It’s found footage, but otherwise, looks a lot different from the previous films– this one has a lot more characters and action.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step up from the previous three films in the series.