Grave Encounters (2011)

This is a film by The Vicious Brothers which is a spoof of sorts of all those paranormal shows like Most Haunted which spend an evening in a supposedly abandoned place and wait for nothing to happen. This film takes place in an abandoned psychiatric hospital. All that is suppose to happen is that they spend 6 hours watching nothing happen and then come out but it turns out that things are far more real than they expected. The thing about these characters at the beginning is that they are all annoying, not one of them you wouldn’t want to give a slap to.

The film doesn’t really get going until it gets dark and even then it’s not the most amazing film that there has ever been. There are some moments that did make me jump but I think that because I found the characters so bland and annoying that anything they said or did was not taken serious. It uses the darkness to great effect and that’s what makes the film worth watching because when its dark you know that something is going to happen but not sure exactly what.

When the film did get good it was just as the characters were being picked off one by one. It was fun trying to pick who was going to be the next one to be killed. Lance Preston (the presenter) suffered perhaps the most intriguing amount of trouble. He is the last one and goes slowly mad before stamping a rat to death and munching on it. Then he gets a lobotomy, this section goes on for quite a while and its only once its finished that you notice it because the whole idea of the lobotomy comes out of left field that it draws you in. What’s strange is that at the beginning we get some bloke saying these had been handed in. Quite why and by whom is a mystery but that is the main issue with the film. Things happen and no sense is made of them.

Performance wise the actors in this were mixed. They all started off as not the greatest and at best they are average. There’s no real sense of connection and it just seems like a group of people who are forced into making a movie together and when they get picked off you find yourself cheering the monsters.

Grave Encounters isn’t a terrible film but it’s in the vein of those found footage and despite not being the best it certainly has its moments. It has an interesting premise and considering that it didn’t have the biggest budgets in the world (rumoured to be around $1 million) it still have some impressive effects.

Rating - 7/10