Not only am I pretty sick of found footage movies, but there’s also a special place in my heart for films that take place in abandoned asylums that try extra hard to make abandoned asylums even creepier than necessary! Sometimes a film comes along that manages to combine both of these things I find super annoying, and that film is Grave Encounters. Despite combining two things that I’m really not a fan of, Grave Encounters ended up being not as absolutely dreadful as it could have been. I know that it was a really small budget and it was one of those movies that gained a following because of its home video release, so I figured that the sequel would’ve had a better production value and could’ve been better than the first. Instead, Grave Encounters 2 ended up being one of the most generic, bland, nonsensical fucking pieces of shit I’ve ever seen! Congrats, guys!
WAIT, YOU’RE SAYING THIS HOSPITAL HAD SHADY PAST THAT INVOLVED DOCTORS DOING EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES?! YA DON’T SAY!
The film opens with a bunch of video bloggers, also known as “vloggers”, talking about the original Grave Encounters. Wait, WHAT? WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW? I’m so fucking confused. After about five minutes of people looking at the camera and saying how awesome or terrible the first film was, we get to see a cool ass party. I use the term “cool ass” lightly, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still fun to type out. I think one of the people filming the party is one of the vloggers from the opening who was trying to figure out if maybe the events of the first film were actually real, considering he couldn’t find any information about any of the cast or crew after the first film came out. He starts receiving weird comments on his review of the movie and one of those comments includes the latitude and longitude of a location in Canada, which is determined to be the location of the mental institution from the first film. This vlogger and his friends decide to take a road trip to the coordinates to try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened there. When they get to the location, WEIRD THINGS START HAPPENING. WOW THAT’S CRAZY. After having some ghostly experiences, they find the guy from the original movie who now looks like Grizzly Adams and it a nutjob. Thinking he’s found a way out, the nutjob starts attacking the vloggers, but that doesn’t do anything. The vloggers end up discovering ghosts giving birth to a baby or some bullshit? OH MY GOD I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THIS TERRIBLE MOVIE. The ending was just some clusterfuck of everything and the main vlogger killing other people and going crazy? THEN THE MOVIE CUTS BACK TO THE MAKING OF GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2. WHAT THE MOTHERFUCK IS HAPPENING. THIS PIECE OF SHIT WAS A GIANT PIECE OF SHIT FUCK YOU.
Did I completely miss why all of the ghosts have a serious case of “big creepy mouth”? Like, was that some sort of plot point or was it just a lazy way of trying to make the ghosts look scary?
Jesus fucking Christ. WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED. Completely ignoring the first five minutes of the film and the last five minutes of the film, Grave Encounters 2 was an incredibly generic found footage movie with cheap, ineffective scares. The ghosts or ghouls or whatever the fuck they were looked awful and generic, especially in the constant nightvision. There was one sequence where the vloggers (holy shit, the main characters are vloggers) seemingly get out of the asylum and back to their hotel, which I thought was an interesting direction for the movie to go in, only to reveal it was some giant trick being played by the asylum? Goddammit. Alright, so incredibly bland, generic show about a bunch of kids trying to find ghosts or some bullshit, but then the opening/closing sequences really push it into the stratosphere of idiocy. I can almost respect the choice to really break the 4th wall and become self-reflexive of the franchise, but it broke that fourth wall with a giant piece of shit. It was one thing to incorporate the opening review montage, because that would’ve been tolerable had it only been used as a device to acknowledge where this film’s characters were coming from, but to end the film with another reveal of people talking at the camera? These people acknowledging that the movie we just saw…WAS ALSO A MOVIE. HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING. If you’ve seen this movie, I apologize, because it’s terrible, but at least you know what I’m talking about. It’s some serious fucking meta garbage that I’m still trying to wrap my brain around. Fuck this movie, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. This review wasn’t even funny, it was just sad. So very, very sad.
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What do you think of the tagline for this movie? “Fear is just a word, reality is much worse”