[Movie] Grave Encounters

When a cheesy character starts telling you that everything you're going to see it's real, and his acting is so bad it hurts, you can already tell it's going to be one lame movie to watch... and Grave Encounters was no exception to the rule.
Granted, the film was not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but for a rip-off of The Blairwitch Project and Paranormal Activity, it definitely felt way short when shooting for the mark. It was somewhat funny to see them spoofing other paranormal reality TV shows, like bribing people with money to say they've seen ghosts and what not, or paying an actor to pretend he's a psychic, but that was as far as the good elements of this movie went.

If the whole point of this production was to suggest that all paranormal reality TV shows are staged, then I don't think they had to make an entire movie just to state that. Plus, even if for a minute you would have liked that this whole thing was real, just for kicks, they immediately start showing some in-congruences that expose the whole stupidity of it all: did they seriously have to be locked in? They don't even have a camera outside the house showing the caretaker putting the chains on the door, so they might as well just have left the door opened and it would have been the same thing, so right there the whole plot starts falling apart like a crumb cake.



Plus, they sustain the idea of "found footage" by saying they wanted to document every so when they finally made it out, they could show to the world everything that happened. But that still doesn't explain what they would keep filming even when their own safety is at stake… so of course, this demands a lot of willingness from the audience: you have to pretend that someone would rather film their own death than save their lives, and if you do so, then watching the rest of the movie is somewhat bearable.



About special effects, yeah, some of them were decent (like the arms sprawling out of walls and ceiling), but the "ghoul effect", of having your regular ghost twist their mouths wide open and such, was way too laughable. Finally, finding the ghost doctors and nurses, and being lobotomized by them, was just such a stretch, even for a mockumentary like this.

That this film garnered a "cult following" is beyond me.. I guess some people just really love bad movies, I'm just not one of them.

Tags: (Movies) Horror