Here goes an idea for a movie… A video crew
descends into some allegedly haunted joint, full of skepticism
and stuff, only to find out that this time around this junk is
real. The footage that was once lost, now is found and
it's being shown to us for the first time. What?
You've familiar with this concept? But here's the thing
though about 'Grave Encounters' from a couple of dudes calling
themselves The Vicious Brothers… the final output is actually
okay. For real. Would I lie to you?
The name of the reality show is 'Grave Encounters' and it is
hosted by the irrepressible Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson) who
informs us in his intro that he used to live in a haunted
house as a child, and has been searching for proof of the
paranormal ever since. Whether that's true or not, that
being living in a haunted house for little Lance, but we do
doubt his sincerity in searching for paranormal activity since
his main purpose seems to fabricating stuff to make his show
more entertaining.
Today 'Grave Encounters' is at the Collingswood crazy house
where atrocities of every nature were taking place before it
was shutdown some fifty years ago, now just known to be the
house where the ghosts live. Thus Lance and his crew,
which includes Sasha on Cam 1 (Ashleigh Gryzko), T.C on Cam 2
(Merwin Mondesir), Matt on tech (Juan Riedinger) and Houston
(McKenzie Gray) the psychic investigator, it's time to track
down some ghostage.
So you know how these things work. They get some
interviews from the locals to setup the mythology that went on
behind the locked gates, they get a quick tour from
the caretaker, they get inside the joint and
setup a bunch of static night vision cameras, and now they are
about ready to do some paranormal investigating. But
wait… gotta chain the doors shut. Absolutely have to
chain the doors shut because that makes total sense.
Again, as expected they traipse through the loony bin, cameras
in tow, and they see nothing, they hear nothing, they
experience nothing. But we know it's not going to be
that way for long, don't we? Ever so slowly the
weirdness starts to occur, first without our crew noticing,
then right in front of their faces. Priority number one
once the strangeness starts to happen? Get the hell out
of there, because even though they are paranormal
investigators, no real paranormal investigator wants to really
find a ghost because that would be scary. Oh wait, they
can't leave because Lance had the gates chained shut.
Whatever, because T.C. is getting out of there no matter
what. I mean in the long history of people who wanted to
get the hell out of a haunted house, you will be hard pressed
to find somebody who wanted to get out of this haunted house
worse than T.C does.
He's not getting out. No one's getting out. This
was episode six of 'Grave Encounters' and we were told at the
beginning there won't be a seventh. Of course I'm
writing this kind of late so 'Grave Encounters 2' is out
already so maybe there is a seventh. It just like it's
going be a whole new cast and crew is all.
Here's the thing people. Movies don't scare me
anymore. I had heard 'Grave Encounters' was really,
really scary and although I don't find being frightened a
pleasant feeling, I still set this up for maximum
effect. I watched it on October 31st, late at night, no
lights and no sound except what came from the surround
sound. It didn't scare me. There are reasons for
this of course, one being that I'm older, another being that
I've seen way too many horror movies and I don't think there
are any new shock methods out there and thirdly, I simply do
not believe in the paranormal. Now if I was actually
locked in a dark, empty insane asylum I would probably be
scared, but not because of ghosts but because there's might be
some nutjob homeless dude in there who looking to crack me
over the head. That being said, I did enjoy me some
'Grave Encounters'.
I realize that this movie wasn't a comedy, but man… if ever
there was a group of people who acted like I would imagine how
people should behave when encountering a malevolent ghost for
the very first time, then this group of actors completely
pulled this off, and their genuine depictions of fear was
really funny to me. These people were off the chain
scared out of their minds and I completely brought into that.
There wasn't an awful lot of ghostly, ghastly imagery in this
film as a whole, most of the tension and fear coming from the
characters trapped in a situation from which they had no
foreseeable escape, but the few horrific images that were in
this film were used very effectively, and if you are sensitive
to this kind of thing, I can see where it would scare the
bejeebus you. You probably should see it coming, but
there was some ghastly stuff on display here.
So what makes this found footage yarn better than the others,
at least in my opinion, was a much better cast of talented
unknown actors, the Vicious Brothers in their freshman outing
seeming to have figured out how to pace one of these types of
movies, and the effective use of the available
surroundings. Maybe this could've been trimmed down a
little for time since the final scene in the catacombs did
feel like it was dragging, but outside of that 'Grave
Encounters' did give the found footage genre a much needed
shot in the arm.
