Review of Grave Encounters (2011) by Jesse O — 23 Oct 2012

I thought this was a solid horror film, with some pretty good scares but an overall lack of underlying tension. In my review for the first Paranormal Activity, I mentioned the fact that things throughout the movie start getting increasingly uneasy.

Like you know there's something wrong even without the movie explicitly telling you or even showing you. Lake Mungo was also like this. I think this is what the movie is lacking. The scares are good, and I think the movie paces itself very well.

But it was missing that sort of uneasy feeling. Something that makes you dread what is coming. This movie doesn't achieve that, at least for me. It is a solid film, and it sort of makes all the ghost hunters to be nothing but charlatans, which was funny, at least to me.

The ghost hunters were certainly pissed off about that. The story really wasn't much, it's formula. I didn't really like the end. For a movie dealing with supernatural forces, I found the ending to be very hokey.

The acting is fine, especially for a low budget horror film. And visually, the movie does a good job at capturing that ghost-hunting style that you've all seen, and it does a good job at making fun of the shows.

So there's a surprising amount of comedy here too...nothing hilarious. But little lines that make everything in the film not feel so serious. So yea a solid film, good scares, some interesting satire of ghost hunting shows, but a lack of dread throughout the film keeps it from being truly great or that scary.