Premise: The crew for a paranormal investigation show lock themselves overnight in an abandoned mental hospital and can't get out.
Anyway...Grave Encounters was exactly what I hoped for. The early stuff when it was playing on ghost hunting shows was funny It all felt pretty accurate. It slow builds well. The spirits in these movies always have a great sense of pacing. They never start off with a kill. They toy around with brushing hair and pushing doors for a while first. The premise allows for there to be plenty of cameras without feeling implausible. The location is great, with a number of unsettling rooms. Best of all, it stays right at the 90-minute run time so it doesn't overstay its welcome. As a viewing experience, I had a lot of fun.
It's not the best found footage movie out there by any means. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A lot of the scares were chosen just because they're good scares. There's not much logic behind them. One person gets turned into a patient and kills himself. Another gets thrown in the air and killed. Why is the old insane asylum cast in eternal night? Why does it turn into an endless maze? That's the kind of thing that could be covered early on. It really doesn't take much. Paranormal Activity has a brief mention about demons and something from the woman's childhood. That's plenty. In the case of Grave Encounters, we know it was a bad hospital. Some people committed suicide. There was a doctor who experimented on them. That really doesn't explain any of the specific hauntings, like the reason the one window keeps opening or the occasional endless hallway.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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