The Graves

A better name for this awful movie would have to be "Hack." You know how bad acting takes you out of the movie? Well, in the case of "The Graves" EVERYTHING takes you out of the movie. Bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, stupid story, and no reason whatsoever to waste your time with this.

I would say that Brian Pulido should go back to comics but he's not good at that either.

It's a waste when someone is given the talent to be great at something yet no drive to follow through. It's also a waste when someone is given the drive for accomplishment but only floods the market with garbage.

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!".

I truly wish that I had had the foresight to read a review before watching this film. Tony Todd's presence couldn't even get more than a 1/10 from me. I watched this film 2 years ago and still remember the title of it only so I can use it as a cautionary tale to friends. I have watched my fair share of films, and a decent amount of them were poorly written and acted. However, this film takes the cake as being so terrible that not even the poor quality of it can produce a laugh. I feel like the people who spawned this film had to say something to the effect of "Hey everyone, let's take two semi-attractive women with no acting experience and give them a garbage script, Tony Todd, a camera we no longer use and all of the pocket change we have on us right now, and see if we can't turn a profit."

If this film actually somehow did turn a profit, I think it was somewhere in the range of 4 McDoubles-20 Chicken McNuggets. If it made more of a profit than that, I'm going to be shooting films all weekend. I think a movie of me making wookie noises at a cut out poster of Liam Neeson will sell better than this piece of trash. I'll call it Nell.

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.

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!