Quick Review: Grave Encounters (2011)

"If you like your scary movies light on the scary, this is the movie you've been waiting for!"

*In Limited Release now, various cities.

Grave Encounters starts off promising enough; with its Horror reality show angle, and its creepy location and premise, but as it wore on, the creepiness diminished more and more until it was gone altogether, and we were left just wanting it to end.

Lance Preston and the crew of "Grave Encounters", a ghost-hunting reality television show, are shooting an episode inside the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, where unexplained phenomena has been reported for years. All in the name of good television, they voluntarily lock themselves inside the building for the night and begin a paranormal investigation, capturing everything on camera. They quickly realize that the building is more than just haunted - it is alive - and it has no intention of ever letting them leave. They find themselves lost in a labyrinth maze of endless hallways and corridors, terrorized by the ghosts of the former patients. They soon begin to question their own sanity, slipping deeper and deeper into the depths of madness, ultimately discovering the truth behind the hospital's dark past...and taping what turns out to be their final episode.

Ooooh!

 It seems to us that Grave Encounters is loosely based on The Travel Channel's show, Ghost Adventures, which features an annoying muscle-bound ghost hunter locking he and his crew inside of creepy old buildings at night, and walking around taunting the ghosts with verbal gems like "Dude!" and "Come at me, Ghost Bro!" and "Dude, come at me ghost Bro!"

Seriously, he walks around trying to karate fight ghosts.

To be fair, aside from lame theatrics like that, the show can be creepy at times, and I dare say creepier than the uber-popular Ghost Hunters on Syfy.

The only real difference is the Sexy Smurf.

Like I was saying, Grave Encounters feels a lot like that show, from the host to the way they "X-mark" certain spots and set up their cameras, to the way that they ask the questions of the ghosts... The problem is that the movie gets mired down in the style it's trying to exude and forgets to be creepy. There's just not enough subtlety. The scares come eventually, but instead of adding to the ambiance, they pretty much instantly kill the mood and atmosphere, and never allowed us to get back into things again.

Once that's gone, the acting and script tend to grate on you, as does the whole "shaky cam" aspect of things, which is never fun even during the best of the movies. I'd say by the time we got to the part of the movie that involved mean ghosts altering time and doing construction on the building, we were done.

Meh.

We've said it before and this movie upholds our claim; movies made by guys that have nicknames are usually atrocious;The Viscous Brothers join the ranks of The Brothers Strauss, The Butcher Brothers, McG, Diablo Cody and others, in showing that they're more concerned with an edgy name than they are with doing something worthy of having an edgy name. The younger crowd and those easily scared may feel the effects of this one, but for most Horror fans, it's going to fall flat. then again, maybe we're just picky.

D

We have no idea where this "Ashleigh Gryzko" came from, but we admire her sexy talents. Also, we're pretty sure she's a Smurf. A pale one.