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
Enter three young ruffians: two guys, one girl. These shoplifting, pot-smoking, cat-in-plastic-bag-trapping punks burst into the place to rob the Corsinis blind, but accidentally kill them, too. At the moment of the old geezers’ murder, the clocks freeze. Soon, their hands inexplicably move backward, thereby enabling the deceased Corsinis to take their revenge. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. 
That’s not all. The kids hear weird sounds emanating from the maze while they’re trying to sleep. Things really escalate when their 8-year-old brother can’t be found, leading to a too-long run through the dark. (Hope you like night vision!) 
Inspector Pontaine (Humphrey Bogart lookalike Robert Sacchi, in his debut) continues to hunt for the real killer, taking him from the bosom of 
Ringo Lam (
Even club hostess and former stripper Alex (Natasha Henstridge) assumes he’s Mikhail, and thus, throws herself at him because she’s the dead dude’s GF. Alain, however, backs off from her advances, which is how you know this is not based on a true story. Later, however, after he spots a peek at her fabulously real breasts while she changes clothes, Alain’s into the idea of letting her rub her