Grave Encounters is the story of a ghost hunter (big "before all the rest of the guys") who is only on his 6th ghost-hunting expedition. His team has the same equipment as the SyFy ghost hunters, all the EMF meters and stuff like that. Eventually, as you'd expect, they find themselves in over their heads. Hallways lead to more hallways. Clocks say it's 1 PM, but there's no light coming through the windows. One of the crew goes missing, so they begin a search-- Did you hear that?
Just as Chronicle was an excellent example of how to use the "found footage" drama, Grave Encounters is not. It seems to have the same budget as the SyFy shows it's mocking. The special effects are pretty corny. I could possibly overlook this if the story was good enough (The Walking Dead's blood is all noticeably fake, but it doesn't detract from the story at all), but the story tries to do a bit too much with too little. We have some kind of entity that's extremely strong, lifting and throwing things, we have weird pupil-less patients (very much like the evil monkey things in Descent), and we have something making thumping noises, we have endless halls, etc. etc. There's just so much to fit in a movie, and none of it is explained at all. They make a huge deal out of losing Matt (seriously, about five minutes of walking around in the dark yelling "Matt? Matt?") then when their overly-tanned psychic disappears (who's also an actual on-screen character on the show, unlike behind-the-scenes Matt), no big deal Let's just get out of here. A lot of glaring plot holes like this mar the movie.
The biggest thing is, there's really no reason for the haunting. Are these the tortured souls of patients? Are the evil doctors' souls haunting them? Are they dead now and that's why it's a darkened maze? Why is it dark out? The movie never provides even a basic answer for this, other than talking about a doctor who did lobotomies in the introduction. Lobotomies were done pretty much everywhere for a very long time. It's a fairly awful procedure, but it's not evil to perform one. It was just the "it" thing at the time.
The effects are pretty awful. Lots of what appears to be eye shadow and stretchy jaws, stupid fake digital hands sticking out of the ceiling. I allow myself to be scared pretty easily, but when my sister popped in the door towards the ending, I barely jumped. I really wanted to like this film. It just kept getting in the way of itself. It shows us too much and tells us too little. And oh my God, are the main characters annoying. They are basically the cast of any of those paranormal shows, and act about as annoying as they would if they ever actually encountered ghosts.
I guess the takeaway is, this is not the worst horror movie I've seen, nor the most inept. It just wasn't good.
Rating: 2/5
No comments:
Post a Comment