The original “Grave Encounters” has apparently become quite the “Sharknado”-esque social media discussion point (Well, OK, so no one from “Glee” watched it the night before their death, but you know what I mean). A group of fanboy film students set out in search of the film’s supposedly haunted asylum to see if the events depicted in the film were real or faked. Well this is the pits. The original “Grave Encounters” wasn’t a masterpiece by any standards, but this 2012 sequel from director John Poliquin (who was apparently a production assistant on “Snakes on a Plane”) and scribes ‘The Vicious Brothers’ (Colin Minihan & Stuart Ortiz, who made the first film) is terrible. It’s a mixture of “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” and the underrated “The Hills Run Red”, and takes forever to get to the gist of it. Actually, it’s probably even worse than “BWP 2”, if that’s at all possible. It might be a bit better than the similarly meta “Human Centipede II”, though, so congrats on that one.
Just how bad is it? The film’s characters attempt to track down the makers of the supposedly ‘real’ first movie. And this search forms the basis of the film’s initial premise. Um…have you ever heard of IMDb? ‘Coz if you have, you’d save yourselves and the audience 90 minutes, morons. That’s the problem when you’re trying for a faux-doco vibe. You have to use your brains. There’s only so much disbelief I can suspend, and this film used it all up before the first ten minutes. That’s a crucial mistake for a faux-reality film like this one. It appears the Vicious Brothers (who make stupid cameos as versions of themselves) are sharing the same half a brain, and from that early moment on, the film was dead to me. Did the filmmakers not show this film to anyone before its release? How could no one have seen the obvious flaw in the whole concept?
Sadly it doesn’t get any better, as much of the film is spent on the so-called ‘fans’ of the first film, and their dopey, bong-smoking partying ways that combined with shaky-cam provided me with fun times. If fun meant boredom and a splitting headache. Of the terrible actors, Leanne Lapp deserves to be singled out for being a terrible actress playing a terrible actress. That’s some feat right there. Watch “The Hills Run Red” again if you want to get your meta-movie on. This isn’t meta, it’s stupid, and the film students are much less interesting than the dorky ‘ghost hunter’ characters from the first film (By the way, star of the original film Sean Rogerson turns up at one point and has apparently forgotten how to act).
OVERALL SUMMARY
Terribly stupid and interminably dull. This one’s barely even a horror film, and when the highlight is an infra-red fart gag, you know you’re in trouble. Nice gory twist near the end, but it’s far too late. Skip it.
