Had Grave Encounters come with traditional opening credits, I might not have gone beyond that point. Here’s why: The film is written, edited and directed by “The Vicious Brothers.” Embarrassed to affix real names to it? Or was “The Extreme Brothers” taken, bro?
A Paranormal Activity-type flick of near-startling inactivity, Grave Encounters begins on a high note, with a straight-faced lampoon of every single crappy “reality” show featuring would-be ghost hunters. Here, the team totaling five aims to shoot its sixth episode overnight while locked inside the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, where hundreds of lobotomies were performed on mental patients many moons ago.
With Sean Rogerson doing a fine job of portraying the host as a total douche (to a point of tangible annoyance), the requisite strange stuff begins to happen following a belabored setup. This includes a woman’s hair being pulled, a window opening on its own, a door slamming on its own, and so on. Things only ramp up at the tail end, but either are highly reminiscent of scenes from other movies — most notably, [REC] and the House on Haunted Hill remake — or are acted so amateurishly, what is meant as horror comes off as humor.
There are two good moments, both of which add up to less than five seconds. The only thing “Vicious” is the film’s apparent lack of vocabulary; most of the dialogue is written with three words: “fuck,” “shit” and “Matt.”
I spit on your Grave Encounters. —Rod Lott