Grave Encounters (2011)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: Douchebags film a douchey ghost hunting show but get more than they douched for when real douchey ghosts show up to end their douchery.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• I can’t believe I’m subjecting myself to another found footage horror film, but here we go. I love you, [REC].
• I used to love the show Ghost Adventures, but it got hokier and hokier and shittier and shattier and then I realized that I don’t believe in ghosts and I stopped watching it. This movie is obviously a spoof of Ghost Adventures, and captures its cheesiness very well.
• Ohh, this “old” psychiatric ward footage is horrendous. Why does literally everyone have black around their eyes?
• These people seem very Canadian…
• This movie apes Ghost Adventures so well it perfectly recreates my feeling of wanting to fast forward through the beginning like every episode of Ghost Adventures.
• Haha, paying the gardener “off camera” to claim he saw a ghost is pretty funny, and something I’m sure these ghost shows do.
• Ahh, the bullshit psychic medium. I applaud this movie’s thoroughness.
• About 1/3 of the way through—things need to start picking up.
• Everything so far is telegraphed, so it’s not remotely scary. Like the camera lingers on a wheelchair in a hallway, and obviously it’s going to move, then it moves. Congratulations. That was as scary as a sunset.
• Apparently the character of T.C. solely exists to say the word “fuck” over and over and over. He literally says at minimum one fuck every sentence. It gets comical after a while and renders all of his dialogue ridiculous.
• At least this is vaguely interesting. Much more tolerable than Session 9.
• Just when this movie seems ok, the girl gets “HELLO” carved into her back, and we’re back into stupid territory.
• And again, a cool ghost face, then an awful invisible air choking. It’s like a seesaw with Mitch Hedberg on one end and Carlos Mencia on the other.

  

  Hey miss, would you like to watch this Carlos Mencia special with me?
• The crew suddenly has hospital bracelets on. Fuck this.
• So they find the missing guy from before and he’s now acting like a mental patient and it’s insanely stupid.
• Arms everywhere! It’s the attack of the high school play special effect!
• Another telegraphed jump scare. Maybe Ray Charles didn’t see that coming since his blind eyes have rotted out of his dead skull, but he still probably did.
• This is getting gravely tedious and repetitive.
• You’re STILL yelling, “Who’s there?! Who is that?!” at the ghost moans??
• So his flashlight goes out, leaving him only the camera light in the dark tunnels, but he still leaves it on to record himself for absolutely no reason other than to drain the battery.
• Lobotomy ending. Lucky bastard.

Is It Actually Scary: There are a few halfway decent scares, and you’ll probably be bored enough by the repetitiveness of the rest of the movie to be caught off guard.

How Much Gore: As much gore as The Vicious Brothers could afford on their $14 budget.

Best Scene: I liked that the front door to the asylum kind of went through a ghost dimensional warp and ended up just leading to another corridor later.

Worst Scene: The ghost arms. Why would they even be doing this?

This room is heavily armed.

Any Nudity: There’s a ghost penis that flies around and inconveniences the crew.

Overall: While I appreciated the spoof aspects of this movie, the actual horror aspects of it were stale and predictable. Despite it being found footage, it had the foundation of a decent movie and a couple of good scenes, but ultimately it was same shite, different setting. It’s basically a [REC] ripoff (Recoff?) with ghosts instead of demon zombies (well, actually there are demon zombies in this) but [REC] actually had a good story and characters to care about. Will any of the Ghost Encounters crew make it out alive? You won’t care in the slightest.

Score: 5 grave regrets (out of 10)