A Sticky Floors and Salty Popcorn Review-Grave Encounters

It's about that time again. Time to break out the candy corn, toilet paper rolls and adult diapers for another thrilling season of Halloween cinematic fare. To that end comes "Grave Encounters," a film that piggy-backs on a lot of what we've seen before in the genre while also providing a nice amount of meta-commentary on the cynicism for the paranormal that shows like Ghost Adventures (ripped off pretty heavily here) engender in the general public.

If you have vertigo, you might want to sit this one out.

This year's vogue "found footage" flick comes to us courtesy of the Vicious Brothers, making their directorial debut in a rather safe formula. "The Blair Witch Project," "Cloverfield" and the "Paranormal Activity" films have all made millions of dollars in profit at the box office, and who can blame some indie film-makers from thinking they can facilitate horrific lightning striking twice again?

The problem with "Grave Encounters" is that it does none of the things those other films do to make us feel a part of the action. The movie does an excellent job of establishing characters we may actually have sympathy for early on, but relegates them to blubbering buffoons quickly in the second act (if you don't laugh at the fate of Houston Gray, purported paranormal psychic extraordinaire, you weren't watching close enough). The only character who feels like he may have some real weight is the film's main protagonist, Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), whose Zak Baggans vomit-inducing routine actually shifts into real, disturbing horror as the film progresses.

Another mistake "Grave Encounters" makes is to allow gaps in the narrative to pry viewers from their visceral reaction to the events on-screen. Some creepy shit happens, to be sure, and that's important for these kinds of films, but with "Cloverfield" and "Paranormal Activity" there was always a sense that we were building to some kind of understanding-that the rational world would hold some kind of explanation or means of understanding what we were seeing in the end.

In a bold move, "Grave Encounters" throws realism completely out the window in the middle of the film. It's an interesting take on the genre, but what exactly happens is never fully explained. The significance of what we see on screen, then, is marred completely by the impossibility of contextualizing the images that flicker before our eyes. Okay, a dead woman rises out of a bathtub (real original, guys), some hands come out of a wall, and people disappear. Got it. Tell me what it means, please.

"Grave Encounters" shows flashes of self-referential brilliance in the opening moments that are marred by silly execution at times and overly deferential scares. That doesn't mean you shouldn't turn out the lights and give it a shot, though. Because when the film does scare you, it scares you in a big way. And its most disturbing scenes rank right up there with the classics of the genre. Just make sure you've got those Depends ready.

Verdict: 3/5 stars