The Graves

This movie was absolutely horrible! It broke my heart too because I was really up to watching it with my all time favorite vocalist Randy Blythe, and two other great actors, Tony Todd and Bill Mosely. But seriously it hurt to watch this! It was if it was thrown together overnight, the acting was cheaply done even Tony Todd's parts but I don't blame the actors. I blame the director! It had no thrill or suspense to it, it didn't even resonate off any suspense when they built up the moment to try and keep you in suspense low and behold nothing happens......I would not recommend this to anyone its not even good to watch for a good gory B flick.

To put my comment in context, I love a good B movie, such as the Tarrantino's "Deathproof", or Peter Jackson's "Braindead", so I approached the film expecting to enjoy it.

I watched this during the "Grimm Up North" horror film festival in the Printworks in Manchester, UK. I could find nothing about it to recommend it. The acting was poor and the plot obvious, lacking any twists. The film completely failed to generate any sort of suspense, shock, or in fact, horror! All in all, extremely disappointing.

I actually enjoyed the short, shown prior to the film, much more than the feature!

This actually appeared on SyFy Channel. I am going to assume they only muted out the few words that I didn't hear and that was pretty much it. So I won't blame the channel for a poor edit. Pretty lame movie at the start quickly introducing us to two hot sisters who are supposed to be into comic books. Then we see them in the punk goth club for one last night out before they take a road trip heading towards more boredom than anything else.

The plot "borrows" from many older movies where young adults breakdown, visit, and otherwise go where angels fear to tread. This is as old as the traveling salesman jokes. Tony Todd makes a few appearances in this movie, but he is not portraying anything scary as he has in his other movies. His character is more like a clown than a monster. I can only imagine his need for money and hope that no one actually watched this movie was his reason for taking the role.

You can't feel anything for the characters since they never really develop during the movie. There is no sense of suspense, no horror, no chills, or thrills. In fact, one scene between actress Clare Grant and Bill Moseley in a school house has no impact on the movie as it really should. I wasn't quaking in fear that anyone was in danger. It felt more like a practical joke, as if Jillian Murray should have walked in and said, "Are you scared? Well you shouldn't be, because you're on Scare Tactics!".

There is one rule in movie watching that seems to always...and I mean ALWAYS...be spot on. That rule is as follows: if you see Tony Todd's name in the title, you're about to be seriously underwhelmed. I can only think of one instance where this deviates and that was the movie Hatchet, however he was in it for all of 20 seconds hence his name was not in the opening credits and was therefore not in violation of the rule. Anyway, enough about that...moving on.

While The Graves isn't horrible, it's certainly middle of the road in pretty much every way. On the upside it's got Bill Moseley (who can do anything from big budget flicks to the lowest of low budget crap) and the phenomenally hot Clare Grant. On the downside, well, just about everything else. This is one of those movies that's not exactly unoriginal but still fails to be the least bit engaging for roughly 95% of the time. The film just doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be. It starts off veering towards a backwoods stalk-and-slash type of movie and then ends up in kooky religious cult territory. Either way, I wasn't exactly involved in the story. I guess if you're up for a movie with a bit of cheese (or happen to be somewhat drunk) this might appeal to you. Otherwise it just feels sort of bland.

The two main actresses look really good in this. And one of them reminded me of Olivia Wilde somehow (although I can't say why). Other than that, you also have two "horror" heavyweights in the cast. But it also feels like quite a few characters got crammed into this. Technically done very solid, but the story might have needed a few tweaks here and there to work out better.

The usual "Duh" moments are not absent, quite the contrary and of course, although pretty feisty and not always in the "victim" role, our lead women do quite a few "stupid" things. Things that go against common sense that is.

What you should check out though, is the DVD of the movie. I only heard the first couple of minutes, but the commentaries on the Disc seem genuinely entertaining! Rent it and give it a listen (the thing they say about the baby is worth the rent money alone). Not great by long shot, but still far from the worst movies I've seen.