Review of Grave Encounters 2 (2012) by Emz S — 21 Mar 2013

This movie was meant as a sequel to the first Grave Encounters. It starts off with several YouTube movie critics giving their reviews, most of which are mixed, then focusing on one reviewer in particular.

The first scene is a party scene which seems to just drag on and on. I think the director was trying to be funny, but it just seemed really weird and out of place. The main character's goal is to become a famous horror director/writer, I THINK, and it shows him making a movie with the typical screaming cheerleader bound in chains, psycho killer plot.

I really didn't understand why this had to be so long. At some point, the MC gets a video response from "DeathAwaits" on YouTube, which is really odd. The MC had been highly critical of GE in his video review and somewhere in the middle of this incoherent plot, suddenly switches and asserts that "Grave Encounters is real!!!" This came out of left field.

So, he hunts down the director who is working on a music video and he begins throwing out shame, "How could you" and asks for an interview. The director has him kicked out, but then immediately goes out to the MC's car to say that he's going to talk to him afterall.

This made absolutely no sense and it doesn't answer the question of how anyone was able to retrieve the footage (assuming that it really happened and this asylum traps you inside). The first movie didn't really have to address that because we all knew that GE was mock reality.

This movie tries to assert that it was real and just made no effort to do so. The interview with the director is strange, short, and aggressive. It just made no sense why he did the interview and why he would bother telling some college kid that he did some kind of cover up for financial reasons.

By the time they actually get to the asylum, I'm completely lost and I have no idea what the hell anyone is doing anymore. As opposed to the first one which had a gradual build up to insanity, this one just throws it all out at once to a ridiculous extreme.

It's so over the top that it just isn't scary and the whole bit with the security guard is, quite frankly, totally stupid. The audience is supposed to believe that in the 45 minutes to an hour that the kids were in there (based on the timestamps on the cameras that I vaguely paid attention to), they all went completely insane.

Seriously? The first movie made it feel real, the second was a joke. Then, they meet up with the sole survivor in the first GE, who is still alive and surviving off of rats as he mumbles to himself insanely.

This isn't believable either. He tries too hard to look genuinely insane and just ends up looking like he's TRYING to look insane but is not. The part that really got me was when the cameras started floating and the asylum demanded, "FINISH THE FILM".

That was so stupid I almost shut off the movie right then and there. The ending of the film is absolutely not believable and the acting is very weak. MC tries to look insane, but totally falls short of that.

He just looks like he's putting on a sales face for a horror flick. I am not one to be extremely critical of films that are meant solely for entertainment, but this movie was just beyond awful.