Really? They made a sequel of this… oh well, it couldn't be as bad as the first one, could it? Oh, wait… And so, since they made a couple of millions with the prequel, the producers decided to give it another go, and they didn't find any better way than making fun of all the online reviewers who panned their previous effort. Asshole move, of course, but since it sorta set the track for what the movie was going to be about, I think that not much can be said about it. A group of kids who saw the first film and believed it was real, decide to go to the same hospital and find out by themselves what really happened there. Of course, they had to put the token "hot girl" in there (Tessa) to lure in the male audience, and the pretty boys (Alex and Trevor) to target the teeny fangirls… all too predictable.



Anyway, I think that since this time around they went more for an actual film vibe, rather than a mockumentary one, they decided to be more outlandish with the plot development, starting with that Ouija board that moved by itself and told them that pretty much the hospital itself wanted them to "film everything". From then on, crap hits the fan and it's just one ridiculous moment followed by another (like the "fake escape", where they exit the building, go to their hotel, and then find themselves inside the hospital again).

The guys who are surviving the mayhem by this point in the movie, find the original guy from the first movie (Lance Preston), who is now all insane with long hair and really ripped (apparently feeding on rats is good for your overall fitness, go figure). Then, the final plot twist is revealed, with a red door that leads to nowhere being the key to everything: you just have to kill everyone else and promise to finish the film in order to be granted exit of the building, easy enough, huh? So a dimensional vortex opens, sucks Lance in, the one young guy kills his possible girlfriend, and leaves the place, the end.



Oh, wait, no.. then we see the same cheesy producer from the first film, saying that everything was fake and that the guy who survived was a really talented filmmaker and what not. At that point I couldn't care less, not even for the after-credits scene, which doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already.

Let's trust that they won't make a third part of this series, because two of this is all I can take nowadays. Not as bad as the first one, but really terrible regardless.

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.