☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
(Didn't Like It)
Netflix Synopsis: A year after a film crew spent a fatal night there, a new team is entering the halls of Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital in search of the truth. What they discover will make believers out of all of them. That is, any who live to tell the tale.
The Peeps: John Poliquin (director); The Vicious Brothers (writers); Richard Harmon, Dylan Playfair, Leanne Lapp, Seth Rogerson
Quick Run Down: Kind of Tense with Scary Moments But Mostly Perplexing
Worth The Watch?: If you've seen the first one and you're alone... or if you and your friends saw the the first one and you're with your friends
Grave Encounters and
Grave Encounters 2 aren't bad movies. They have entertaining moments and decent to good scares. If you saw the first one, though (read my review - it's below!) you know it starts strong but ends flatly.
Grave Encounters 2 tries to do something different, but it does it in a way that creates too many questions.
GE 2 immediately starts us off with "vloggers" giving their responses to the original
GE. There are dissenters and lovers, those scared and those disappointed. This opening ends with Alex (Richard Harmon) from "Alex's Movie Madness" and his own review
. The film stays with Alex and, come to find out, Alex and his bud, Trevor, are senior film students putting together a film for their thesis film project. Alex is getting more and more distracted from his actual movie, though, as he gets further and further into the idea that
GE 1 is real (meaning the hospital is a real place, the events that happen in the film are real, all the people in the film are real and therefore dead, and the hospital's ghostly nature is real). Pretty soon, Alex foregoes his inital project because he is only interested in telling the true story of
Grave Encounters, documentary horror style. The parties involved decide to travel to the hospital and explore it for the sake of expanding on this documentary idea which they think is visionary. From there, "madness" and "sacry-ness" ensue. Supposedly.
GE 2 is sort of like
Evil Dead 2 (there are actually some similarities if you consider certain things that happen in the movie; this movie is not NEAR as good)
. It's the exact same movie as the first one, only expanded with some extra stuff thrown in. In fact,
GE 2 even goes so far as to include footage from the first one. So, if you didn't see the first one, you don't really need to because you pretty much learn everything about it and see all of its scare and jumps moments in the second one since they are shown randomly through the course of the sequel. The reason behind this is because the second film constantly references the first film as if it were a real film. That means: A group of kids (fictional) are making a documentary (not real) about a real horror movie (that's not real)...? And okay - I get this but it just... doesn't work. I can't take it serious. Maybe it's me, but there's an inherent disconnect in that concept that immediately takes me out of the film. I simply couldn't/can't suspend my disbelief long enough to get into the idea and take the film seriously. And I wanted to. The first
GE wasn't bad and I thought the second one might correct the flaws or at least give us something new. It did give us something new, but its just a rebaking of the same cake. That's disappointing too because the Vicious Brothers (writers only this time) were essentially given the opportunity to remake their first feature. They could have done whatever they wanted, and they did, I guess. It just turns out to be kinda crappy. The opening is fun and the hospital still looks and feels creepy, but the movie just uses tropes from the first one in abrupt and arbitrary ways. Don't bother with story, either. The fictional film that's real investigated through a fictional film concept is perplexing enough, but then you have the actual STORY which is just silly. I hate to say it, but the Vicious Brothers aren't good screenwriters. They have good ideas, but they are convoluted, confusing, and - track record shows - heavy on the front, light in the end. I want to give them credit for coming up with a different concept, a sort of metafictional fictional reality, but I can't let it go that the movie just isn't that good. Then there's this thing that happens at the end... it just sort of gets laughable.
So, if you want to watch a decent movie with limited scares, a little bit of tension, but a very perplexing plot, check out
Grave Encounters 2. I thought it was alright, for what it was worth, but you can't really look past the surface without finding it lacking. I don't think you'll be disappointed if you watch it, but I do think you'll find your expression a confused one once the movie finishes.
Check it out. It's on Netflix!
 |
There's a scene involving this kind of footage - thermal rendering - that's
hilarious and might make the whole movie worth watching. It's low-bro humor
but it's funny. Fast forward to 41:00 left in the film if you're interested. |
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