Film student Alex Wright (Richard Harmon) is obsessed with the movie Grave Encounters. The more that he researches the making of the film, the more convinced he is that it is not just a movie, that it is real footage of what really happened to the crew of the tv series. Armed with their own set of cameras, Alex and friends Jennifer (Leanne Lapp), Jared (Howie Lai), Tessa(Stephanie Bennett) and Trevor (Dylan Playfair) track down the haunted hospital to uncover the truth behind Grave Encounters.
The preeminent flaw of Grave Encounters 2 is that it is under the impression that the first film is a cultural phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project, instead of the obscure little horror film that it actually is. The only people that I know who have seen it only did so because it was conveniently streamable on Netflix. The Vicious Brothers mistook "passingly entertaining" for "cultural tour de force." Grave Encounters is not The Blair Witch Project, not even The Human Centipede. It is merely "good enough" for a laid back Friday night scare.
In addition to the utterly pretentious, meta-cinematic premise, Grave Encounters 2 violates the cardinal sin of found footage films: thou shalt not force thy found framework on the film. This is something that The Blair Witch Project itself flirted with and Cloverfield violated. In an attempt to call back to the original film, director John Poliquin stretched the found footage premise to the point of disbelief, requiring diegetic cameras to be rolling far beyond when it was actually realistic to do so. It required no less than 16 video blogs, a student film, a student documentary about that student film, a spy camera, all of the cameras from the first film (set up in the hospital in the exact same locations as in the first film), a police car-mounted camera, a tv spot and revisited footage from the first film. Worst of all, none of this unrealistically elaborate framework did anything more than remind us of how well-done the found footage in the first film was by comparison.
Grave Encounters 2 also suffers from something that seems to be increasingly common in low-budget horror movies: an overly long opening segment. The film opens with a series of 15 YouTube reviews of the first movie (supposedly establishing it as an edgy, divisive, widely popular film: none of which is true), listlessly meanders into a footage from an insultingly stereotypical college party (in which the protagonist passes out while in drag and is repeatedly teabagged by his roommate) and finally comes to a head with footage from the protagonists own D-level horror movie "Slash 'n Burn," chased by over twenty solid minutes of research into the film Grave Encounters before they ever leave campus. The resulting thirty minutes of cross-dressing, drinking, drug use and sexual assault could easily have been condensed to ten minutes of setup and research, but it drags on for seemingly no other reason than padding the movie to 90 minutes.
So what does all of this build up to? Evidently the house watches Alex's vlog, including his unimpressed review of Grave Encounters and subsequent conviction that it is real. Encouraged by this turn of events, the house, using the username DeathAwaits666, leaves Alex a trail of bread crumbs to the supposedly non-existent hospital so that it can 1) kill his friends and 2) convince Alex to make a sequel to Grave Encounters.
That's it. That's the payoff. That is what they think is worth 90+ minutes of somebody's time. It's like Cartman pooping on Mr. Garrison's desk to avoid a fight at recess and hoping that nobody figures out why.
That all being said, the film is not entirely without merit, although it does skim dangerously close to just that. When they actually get to the hospital, they delve deeper into the workings of the building than its predecessor did. In the first movie, it was extremely easy to miss the trail of breadcrumbs that consisted of the film's back story. Those details are pleasingly expanded on in the sequel, adding additional context to the happenings of the first film.
The inclusion of the deranged and lobotomized Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), the protagonist from the first movie, was Grave Encounters 2's only saving grace. His manic, scattered performance is outright exceptional: far better than this film deserves. Watching him dissolve into insanity, it is extremely easy to forget that outside of these two movies, his most notable role was Death Dealer #2 in Underworld: Evolution. His seamless transitions between lunacy and almost-sanity during his self-interview is fiendishly entertaining to watch.
Grave Encounters 2 is the very definition of a unneeded sequel that fails to understand why its predecessor was so enjoyable. The reappearance of Lance Preston is almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie for (almost). Ultimately, I would rate it a 3, putting it in line with fellow disappointments Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Friday the 13th Part 2 and Dead Snow. Becky, ever the more generous between the two of us, rated it a 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment