★ 10 / 10
Great movie: I enjoyed this movie much more
R T
Great movie: I enjoyed this movie much more than I expected. Of course, any movie with Lance Henriksen is worth a watch IMO. It started a little slow but…
Great movie: I enjoyed this movie much more than I expected. Of course, any movie with Lance Henriksen is worth a watch IMO. It started a little slow but picked up speed and the ending was excellent! It starts with the group of ghost hunters showing they stage all the effects...until they investigate a truly haunted place. It was terrific and if you like supernatural horror movies you should watch this!
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★ 4 / 10
Do you have a Greatest Hits albums from
jesse o
Do you have a Greatest Hits albums from your favorite band? I'm sure some of you do, considering the fact that I don't really see many modern artists releasing…
Do you have a Greatest Hits albums from your favorite band? I'm sure some of you do, considering the fact that I don't really see many modern artists releasing Greatest Hits albums yet. Hell, when you go to a concert, your favorite artist usually plays what he/she is most famous for, maybe they sprinkle in some new material so they're not bored performing the same old songs. This happens in horror movies as well. What I mean by that is that some movies are really just a greatest hits collection of scares that other films pulled off to far more effect. And then there's this movie. Where do I even begin with this movie? Let's just say that this is like a cover band version of the greatest hits collection. Look, as much as the genre is getting old by now, I genuinely do like found footage movies, when they're done well of course. Look at Rec as the perfect example of how to do found footage films right. Or Trollhunter. Hell, even Chronicle (which is more mainstream than the previous two films) is pretty great. This movie borrows, to me, heavily from a superior movie Grave Encounters, which was followed by an awful and insufferably self-aware sequel. Now, of course, not every found footage movie that focuses on a paranormal investigation team is copying Grave Encounters, but this film is clearly inspired by that. You can almost see The Vicious Brothers' (writers and director of Grave Encounters) specters in some scenes. That's how shameless this movie can be at times. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad movie. I'd say that it was ok at best, it was certainly better than the awful Grave Encounters sequel. But there's a lack of originality here that, I think, hurts this movie more than it would hurt others of the same ilk. I guess that lack of originality wouldn't be so much of an issue if I thought the movie was good, but I don't know, I still think it would have detracted from the overall experience when you consider just how much this movie borrows from other sources. If you hate found footage films, this really isn't gonna change your mind in the slightest. It might just do the exact opposite, it just might entrench your hatred of the genre even more. The cast of characters, while meant to be comical in a douche-y sort of way, are honestly kind of insufferable, with the minor exception of Julie. Roger is an annoying ass. Tim is kind of a dick. Chad isn't so bad, since he's behind a camera a lot of the times. Julie is really the only likable character in the entire movie and she's not even given that much to do other than just be the guys' butt of sex jokes. That's not to say anything for the actors, who are all perfectly decent in their roles, I just found the scripting of the characters to be really bad. The movie starts out fairly slow which, for a movie that lasts less than 80 minutes, is never good. And I understand why they started out this way, you can't just hit the ground running in this type of flick. You need to establish the characters, who they are, why they're filming and all of that. That's another thing, the only reason (there's a guy who's shooting a documentary on the team) there's someone shooting is everything is so stupid. This guy broke up with his girlfriend, so his friend, trying to make him focus on something else, lets him shoot a documentary on his paranormal team. Mind you, this is a paranormal team that uses a special effects guy to fake all of the ghosts that appear on their 'show'. So, let me get this straight, this guy ran the risk of his friend exposing to the world that his show is a fake just to do him a favor. I mean, that's what friends are for I suppose, but talk about idiocy. If I tried to pass off my fake paranormal show as real, the last thing I'd do is have someone document all my fakery. It's quite stupid. Anyway, the point is that I understand they have to start out slow at first, setting up the atmosphere and teasing certain things that will pay off later, but I think this movie took it too far. Perhaps that's hyperbole, but I just felt the pacing was way off for a movie that, realistically, probably runs like 76 minutes. The horror is all the same found footage shit you've seen elsewhere. There's some cool moments here, but those are few and far in between. But, again, those cool moments feel ripped off from other, and superior, films. Because of that, there's no real weight or strength to the scares. It's a whole lot of 'been there, done that'. And that's not to say that people didn't work hard, behind and in front of the cameras, in order to make the best movie they possibly could. I don't think they set out to make a purposely terrible movie. But sometimes all of that effort simply just isn't enough to elevate a derivative script into a good horror movie. This is proof of that. Again, I can't stress this enough, I didn't think that this was a bad movie, but it's one that just doesn't have enough good ideas of its own to make it worth a watch. This is ok at best, and even that may be generous. You can do worse (Grave Encounters 2 for example), but there's no real reason you should watch this when there's so much better stuff out there.
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4.7/10
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