Review of Grave Encounters (2011) by Joey S — 24 Jul 2013

A hopelessly unoriginal horror movie with a handful of good scares near the end, Grave Encounters is found-footage at its most mediocre. It follows a group of reality TV ghost-hunters as they explore an abandoned mental asylum for the sixth episode of their show.

They make the brilliant decision to lock themselves into the asylum overnight, leading to their realization that they are now trapped in a haunted asylum and their sanity gradually slips away. My biggest problem with the movie, aside from the extreme lack of scariness until the last twenty minutes, is that the characters are all intensely stupid and frustrating.

The main character Lance Preston, who hosts the reality TV show in the movie, is a narcissistic jerk who starts off annoying and never really becomes sympathetic. There are no likeable characters in the movie, which makes it a lot easier to root for the ghosts rather than the humans.

The characters make typically genius scary movie decisions like splitting up frequently and investigating strange noises, and as usual it rarely ends well when they do. The concept and style is as ordinary as it gets, borrowing heavily from Session 9, Paranormal Activity, and [REC] without ever doing much to distinguish itself from those three movies.

It does have a few well-executed scares near the very end, especially when they encounter patients/ghosts on a few occasions. It turns out the ghosts of mental patients are actually not as friendly as you might expect.

Still, the scares at the end don't make up for the first hour, which is more or less just made up of characters yelling at each other with the occasional mysterious loud noise thrown in for variety.

This might satisfy some people who can't find anything better to watch, but I'll take [REC] over Grave Encounters any day of the week.