Directed by The Vicious Brothers (Colin Minihan, Stuart Ortiz)
Starring: Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray, Juan Riedinger, Arthur Corber, Bob Rathie, Ben Wilkinson
Not Rated (contains R-level pervasive language and intense terror/violence).
SCAREmeter: 7.5/10 (very frightening, disturbing)
GOREmeter: 6.5/10 (some brief, gruesome, bloody supernatural and surgical images)
LAUGHmeter: 3.5/10
OVERALL: 2.5/4
Available on Netfilx Streaming
I loathe "paranormal reality shows," such as Ghosthunters or Destination Truth. I just plain despise them. I can barely stomach reality television as it is (they're supposed to be "unscripted," but somehow their plots are more contrived and trite than the average church video), but then you mix in "paranormal investigator" hacks and false scares in a lurid combination, and it's a media travesty. So I got a few light laughs out of the early scenes in the 2011 cult independent horror film GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, as the cast of one such paranormal investigation crack up off camera at their dramatic "in-character" antics. Ironically, the movie occasionally succumbs to a similar approach, but most of the time, it's a fun haunted hospital chiller.
Presented as "found footage," the raw footage (edited for time) of the unfinished last episode of a short-lived series called Grave Encounters, in which a crew led by host Lance Preston (played by Sean Rogerson), along with "occult specialist" Sasha Parker (played by Ashleigh Gryzko), "medium" Houston Grey (Mackenzie Gray) and a sound and camera crew. For their ill-fated six episode, Grave Encounters goes to the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, where Dr. Arthur Friedkin secretly performed experimental surgery on thousands of patients before the hospital was closed in 1965, and is now reputed to be haunted by former patients and hospital staff.
Like these things tend go, it starts off uneventful, as the characters attempt to spend a single night locked in the hospital, but gradually, the spooks start to present themselves, and by then, it's too late to leave.
I'm not partial to horror as a genre; it's fine, and a great horror movie is as great as any other great movie, but like comedy, there's a distinctly lower success rate for horror movies than say, drama or action, because it's a trickier atmosphere and pacing and relies more on the particular audiences' experience. But there are types of horror movies that I'm more likely to be entertained by, even if it isn't particularly smart or creative, and GRAVE ENCOUNTERS falls into that category. I get a kick out of atmospheric horror movies, especially haunted houses and similar ilk, with morbid tropes and ghosts. Basically, I enjoy a scary movie that translates the traditional haunted house ride to the screen. It's not like that's the only kind of horror movie that I like, but a lesser movie playing by those rules gets an advantage with me.
GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is occasionally corny. I do not like the "found-footage" technique, especially as the characters start having to justify why they're still filming the onscreen horrors ("We gotta document this," and "People are gonna want to see this,"). The characters aren't terribly likeable to begin with, but similarly to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, as tensions rise and the characters start acting more stressed and on edge, I tend to hate them. But when people wake up from a nap to find hospital I.D. wristbands with their names and information strapped on without explanation, I love it. When the ghosts of suicide victims explode from within a bathtub of blood-red water and drag unsuspecting victims back with them into oblivion, I love it. When ghostly doctors strap the living down to the operating table and perform a lobotomy, I'm having a hell of a time.
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