Grave Encounters

Indifferent three stars. Regardless of how pointless and unscary it was, the first half was fun thanks to its fairly convincing portrayal of a cringe-worthy TV show about the supernatural. The second half hour was the most fun – the atmosphere of an abandoned mental hospital at night, the hints of the supernatural, the handycam slowly and fearfully wandering through the corridors… nice. Unfortunately, the fact that those “interesting night” scenes take about two thirds of the film reduces a little their effect. The last half hour was already monotonous, even if there were a couple of original appearances of the ghosts. It’s OK for a cheap found-footage flick from Canada, much better than I expected, but also a lot less good than it should be for me to remember it after a week, a month or a year. (15/08/2011)

As expected, a shoddy, boring and criminally unoriginal fund-footage; and I don’t mean the concept and the settings, which are alright, but the process by which the standard wandering around corridors was put together into something remotely reminiscent of a story. It does have a couple of good moments, but bloody hell, it never escalates! I don’t know why I keep looking for an original golden needle in this haystack of pointless movies. (17/01/2021)

The Vicious Brothers high-fived themselves on whether they could make a horror film that was fundamentally incapable of coming up with anything new, found a sanitarium, five nouveau riche actors for the lead roles, and several cameras without stabilizers. For the very first signal it works, flashlight beams down empty corridors, tiles, prism lights, just plain crap; in the long run it fizzles out with the first storyteller who can't do anything more than any other horror storyteller in recent memory. Plus, you'd be murdering the characters from morning till night. It makes you realize the skill of the creators of The Blair Witch Project or [•REC]. (22/06/2015)