Horror flick review: Grave Encounters 2 - 2012

Grave Encounters 2

Director: John Poliquin

2012

Horror

A film student gets convinced that the film,”Grave Encounters” is actually for real and not fiction at all. He gathers evidence to prove his thesis but no one seem to believe him, at least not ‘til he confronts the producer of the movie. At first he gets thrown out but security but later gets an off-camera interview with the producer. Using candid photography he still manages to get the producer on tape and he does in fact admit to that all the footage in the first movie is for real and that all the actors have disappeared. The next step is to break into the same asylum where the movie took place and prove once and for all that it’s all for real. That’s something he and his friends shouldn’t’ have done!

Just like in the sequel to The Human Centipede the first movie exists in the universe of the film. That is to say that it’s considered to be a movie that’s been made and that the sequel itself is in fact an original movie. Because if the first film is just a movie how can the sequel be a sequel? It can’t, it must treat the first film as a film and not as reality which is quite uncommon in my opinion. But this argument gets really complicated when the first movie is claimed to be the truth and not just a movie. I also feel that I could fill several pages with my thought about this but would anyone really care to read about that? I don’t think so, so I’ll stop now…

I think this is a quite clever film! It was written by the Vicious Brothers which also wrote and directed the first film. It doesn’t catch me quite away though, it takes some time before it gets really interesting and it doesn’t get scary until we are back in the asylum. But when we get there the amount of paranormal activity is much more intense than in the first film. There is also a different approach to it since the characters in this movie really believe that something weird is going on, which the characters in the first movie didn’t.

The acting is nice most of the time and the visual effects are stunning. I’m not necessarily too fond of night vision shots but they do the trick here and it’s a very nice illusion of what the real deal would look like if something like this were to happen.

We don’t get many answers to our questions about what’s really going on in that asylum, what happened there and why it’s so violently haunted. But it’s an effective movie and I think it’s safe to say that we can expect another sequel! Why shouldn’t there be? Both of these films have been very effective and scary and this is actually even more so than the first film. It’s a great concept, found footage and haunting combined!

7/10