Grave Encounters 2 (2012)

The first Grave encounters movie was awful. And still it was better then this. This movie has an awful story line. It has an awful ending. It is not scary. It is just campy. I do not know why people like it. i do not know why it got a 5.2. I give it a 1 because it is a big pile of steaming poo poo. Do not wast your time. And do not waste your money do not see this movie. If you want see something scary see King Kong (1933). King Kong (1976) is also very scary. King Kong (2005) is also very scary. Kong skull island is also very scary. Son of Kong is also very scary. King Kong lives is also very scary. Godzilla is also very scary. Godzilla raids again is also very scary. But this is wast of time. It is also a wast money. Do not see it.

This movie brought an interesting idea to the table - that the original was completely true and that those actors are now missing and/or dead. But the way it executes this idea is just terrible. 20+ minutes of a boring group of teens making the discovery that GE was NOT fabricated, and making the obvious decision to follow in its footsteps and sacrifice their lives for a sequel.It's not like they capture anything on tape that wasn't already done in GE - in fact the number of different scare methods are actually less. But the atmosphere is still there and watching it before bed has robbed me once again of sleep. What can I say I have a weakness for the asylum setting.The characters are kind of obnoxious compared to the previous movie, and the camera is definitely more shaky than I remembered, making this a more annoying experience than it had to be. Not to mention the ending is a major disappointment. I am not one for the 'everybody dies' endings, but the escape and the manner it was achieved kind of ruined the experience.If you loved GE you could watch this, or you could just re-watch GE for a better time.

Richard Harmon leads a group of his film student buddies on a project to locate the Grave Encounters site, looking to prove if what was seen in that was real or fictional. Researching it, the location of those involved in that "first film" cannot seem to be found, and Harmon even interviews Grave Encounters host Lance Preston's dementia-plagued mom to gain his whereabouts to no avail. Contacted by "Death Awaits" through his review YouTube channel, Harmon discovers the location of the site, and a brief visit to Hollywood to speak with the producer of Grave Encounters (a hidden camera recording the conversation) seems to indicate he's covering up the actual fates of those gone missing, with only the footage found. So the students head to the hospital, enter in despite warnings from a security guard not to do so (he follows them, hears a noise upstairs, goes to investigate, and winds up electro-shocked by an unseen presence in one of many ridiculous paranormal events of the film), with the hospital *enveloping* them. The students are lost in the hospital, as in the first found footage film, with the walls and rooms shifting and changing, sending them around in circles, as they encounter specters which give them chase, eventually encountering Lance Preston who has degenerated into a mouse-eating, filthy, unstable, babbling loon. Preston, however, introduces them to a red door that might be the key to them escaping. But "Death Awaits" has a request: to "finish the film" so that "more will come". Ludicrous sequence which has three of the students (one is thrown out a window, another has her body crushed then dragged away from the camera's eye) actually leaving the hospital, driving to their hotel, entering their room, getting their gear, and taking the elevator which opens to reveal the basement of the hospital they had just escaped! The liberties of the screenplay have a residual replay of the hospital's insane doctor and nurses from years prior lobotomizing a pregnant patient, taking her baby, and sacrificing it in a ritualistic ceremony complete with chalked pentagram above as Harmon and Leanna Lapp (his actress girlfriend) hide in a closet looking on in horror. Gosh, I just needed to see Sean Rogerson (Preston) eating another mouse. He gets to play all bonkers, including his crushing a kid's head open with a tool and choking him to death in a bathroom (just the way we all want to go, right?). Harmon is so cold and robotic, how Lapp's character could see anything in him is beyond me. A couple of fading white ghouls with black eyes and elongating mouths pursue the students. There are cameras levitating by invisible entities who shoot the activity of Lance Preston as he goes into ghost show mode for a wonky sequence. There's even a portal that opens in a wall and handwriting on a wall telling Preston to finish the film. Harmon, proving what a marvel of a boyfriend he is chooses his own welfare over his gal's. Some good special effects and, although silly as all get out, the plot developments are certainly different than the norm. I think the cute YouTube reviews of the Grave Encounters played at the beginning was a nice throwback to what Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) did for The Blair Witch Project.

Grave Encounters 2 is about a group of five film students who decide to follow up on the events of the first film, mainly due to one of the group member's persistence in finding out if the events of Grave Encounters were real or not. To their horror, not long after entering Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, they soon find out that the events that happened there before were very real.This installment is really nothing like the first one in being that it is supposed to be filmed like a documentary and have you actually believe that these are real people documenting real events. The first one did this successfully, but this one had the opposite effect and is a bit like three separate movies put together. The first 35 minutes is like some kind of crap frat party film with the students getting high and getting drunk. The next 30 minutes, when they get to the asylum and set up their camera gear, there is not much build up to events...it just starts taking off, but there are a few good scares here though. The last third of the movie is where it just goes so ridiculously over-the-top it feels as if you're actually watching a Hollywood horror movie instead of a "documentary". Any credibility it had of being a "documentary" before this is completely tossed out.Grave Encounters 2 only JUST scraped a "decent" rating for me purely because of the scares that are in the middle of the movie when the students are moving through the asylum to look for paranormal activity. If it wasn't for those moments then the movie would have completely bombed.Overall it was OK, but it is nowhere near as good as the first one. Very disappointing.