The Crying Dead

I watched this with a bunch of friends expecting to laugh at a cheesy movie, but it was actually pretty good!It started off questionable but once it got rolling it was more believable.We got into the story and characters. The acting was good and the improved dialog kept it from being corny. The most charming actors were the old man, Becka Adams who played the producer, and the super obsessed lead male character. It feels like you are there with these people messing around in an old abandoned hospital. I liked that we see them faking paranormal activity before anything really starts. That was a fun touch. Honestly, enjoyed it as much as any bigger budget films of the same genre. Definitely fun to watch with friends on Halloween.

So I started watching this for the first time this morning. I have to just say right off the bat, anyone who is familiar with the former Linda Vista hospital in Los Angeles then you would immediately recognize the shots outside of the hospital, it's a very iconic building. The same year this movie came out is when AMCAL Multi-Housing Inc. bought the building and renovated it into apartments. That is one of a few reasons why that scene was filmed out back of the hospital, since in this movie the hospital goes by a different name. I kinda giggled when Chris' character said it was "in a remote region of the northern California wilderness".

Yeah The Crying Dead was OK, but I wish someone would really kill (no pun intended) it with a ghost investigation movie.

I just had to review this movie. I was one of those foot footage, stuck in an old haunted hospital, fans who has been waiting forever to see this. I waited while grave encounters comes and goes. Then grave encounters 2, then several movies just like GE, even one directed by Oliver Stones son. In my opinion GE is and probably always will be #1 on the list.

Now back to back to this mess of a movie. The editing is bad, the acting for the most part is bad and the story is very rushed and doesn't allow you to connect with anyone. Most of these movies will either start out slow others start out with a bang but in most cases will move in some kind of direction and allow you to somewhat connect with an actor or actress. This one however is all over the place. OK, we are led to believe they are shooting a pilot or sample for a TV series, but it just doesn't seem realistic. It just comes across and a bunch of kids with too much time on their hands wondering around an abandoned building with camcorders. To top that off it may have a jump or 2 but overall its not very scary at all. The CG was amateurish and unnecessary and the main "ghosts" of the movie were really not scary.

All in all 2 thumbs down and for the amount of time they had to re-do it they could have done a lot better!

SAD SO SAD!

WOW!!! This movie is just beating the "found footage" genre into the ground. It's like the filmmakers said,"Did you see "Grave Encounters"?...well...we can make one MUCH MUCH worse!" And DID THEY EVER! I have to admit I have seen WORSE acting in a found footage film,but this lame story has been told a bazillion times,and there is NOTHING original about it. The FX are not SPECIAL at ALL...they are actually at the point of being laughable! When the first "ghost" showed up,I darn near turned the movie off,because I KNEW it wasn't going to get any better.

...I was correct.

THE CRYING DEAD AKA THE WHISPERING DEAD documents members of a crew for a new paranormal reality show breaking into and staying overnight at an abandoned hospital, where they encounter more than they bargained for.

This found footage movie was released the same year as GRAVE ENCOUNTERS (2011), a thematically virtually identical but far superior found footage movie which demonstrates how much potential was unrealized here.

The prologue shows old footage of some kind of experiment but then nothing later in the movie ties into it. The actual ghosts are not given the prologue treatment. Also, there is a tale of cannibals and of a patient who cut his nurse that go nowhere. The crew members just disappear and we never know what exactly happens to them. The motivations of the supernatural beings are entirely unclear, which is surprising, given how much time the movie spends recounting the history of the hospital. In short, this is one of the more disjointed found footage movies I have seen.

Everything is predictable from a mile away, save for one mild twist: when the first supernatural events occur, the crew members still think that it is prank played on them; and the motivation for thinking so is actually plausible. Actually, the order in which the team members are picked off one by one was also something I did not predict, but the end result was all the same. There are no really new ideas here.

Finally, the way the ghosts are introduced and used for horror is pretty bad. It is really obvious that the ghosts are just a special effect, and for a moment I thought this was actually meant to be a plot twist in which someone sets up hokey ghosts to scare the crew or something.

Some of the scenes had the potential to be scary, but the victims are dispatched far too soon to unsettle the audience, and then, as mentioned, we never find out what precisely happens to them.

Finally, I don't understand why so many found footage movies make their characters so unlikable. I understand that for dramatic purposes, it is good to have characters with tragic flaws, but we the audience still have to be able to look beyond that to care for them.

I did not rate this lower because, despite the disjointedness, the story itself was fairly coherent and the movie had at least some atmosphere.

Overall, I consider this a below average found footage film. Some more recent and better found footage treatments of the same concept are HOLLOWS GROVE (2014) and GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM (2018).