Greystone Park

I am an aspiring filmmaker and a fan of 'found footage' films such as 'Chronicle, Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project'. I went to see this film in Dubai with zero or no expectations at all having not heard any negative or positive reviews.

If I were to give the review in a nutshell, it would be "Nothing". The film makers dwell in to a mental hospital with a hand-held shaky cam trying to film the supernatural in the supposed 'Haunted Hospital'. What we are shown during the length of the film are poorly lit and edited clips coupled with awful sound bytes that do nothing for the film.

I wish Sean Stone the best of luck for the future but in my opinion, this film should have been a short 20 minute submission to perhaps an indie film festival.

I am a huge fan of 'found footage' horror films, not because there are many good ones about but because I love that style of horror, I think it is truly terrifying when done right. I think anyone who watches such films should take them for what they are and not compare them to bigger budget horror films, or other films generally.

Greystone Park (GP) is nowhere near the best found footage film I've seen, but is not the worst either. It is a poor film but I think some of the reviews are a bit too harsh. The acting in these films is never going to be great, but in GP it is fine for the purposes. It is set in a genuinely scary ex-asylum and there are some great freaky moments, such as the discovery of a creepy giant doll and one of the characters inexplicably laughing at strange times. The film sets up a really great, scary atmosphere but falls flat on its face when we get very poor, confused dialogue between the characters, too much shouting and swearing, and way too much of the shaky-camera business. The ending is also very confusing.

I would say that found-footage fans should give it a watch, they may just like it, but for anyone who is not a big fan of the genre I would give it a big miss and spend your precious film-watching time on the better films like The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Evil Things and the first 3 Paranormal Activities.

Greystone Park has to be one of the least engaging films I've ever seen. Immediatly from the outset I was drawn to it as much as I am fire, acid or something really really pointy.

It's yet another found footage-esque film where a group of folks interested in documenting supernatural activity break into an asylum and.......serious dejavu.

This cost over half a million dollars to make and I'd love someone to explain to me where the money went. Was everyone overpaid? Did they have fantastic catering? Were all the cast put up in 5* hotels with travel covered and a personal masseuse? Maybe champagne and caviar for everyone in between takes? Because it sure as hell didn't go on the production.

I've seen some real stinkers in this genre, and let's be honest most of them are the same movie recycled over and over again. But this is right up there! Again it's un-engaging, it's boring, it's stupidly dark, it has pathetic character development and as is commonly the case nothing ruddy happens!

Pitiful, embarassing and yet another carbon copy movie just done worse than even usual.

The Good:

Nope

The Bad:

Seen it all before, all of it

Annoyingly dark

Poorly made from start to finish

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Maybe the budget was spent on silk toilet roll?

I tend to try to find something to enjoy and appreciate in every single horror movie I watch no matter how mediocre it may be and yet I found this obscure film to be very boring most of the time and very frustrating when not boring. It has a somewhat interesting premise, director Sean Stone plays the lead character named Sean and the other cast members also play characters named after themselves; in other words, they all seem to play themselves. Even Oliver Stone also appears as Oliver, Sean's father. The movie starts with a dinner talk about ghosts and then three youths set out to explore an abandoned insane asylum and film their exploit. For about an hour, basically nothing worthwhile happens as they walk around inside the asylum. The setting is actually quite wonderful in itself and yet it simply serves the function of being a background for the three characters to argue among themselves, the line "let's get the hell out of here" is uttered periodically! Some false and some real scares occur in the last 20 minutes or so and yet they are quite mild.

I wish I could vote this movie zero. I wish I could go a step further and vote it into the negatives. The only problem there would remain that there aren't enough negative numbers to properly describe how bad this movie is. It's not scary, it's not artsy, it's not smart. It just hates you.

This movie hates you.

Got epilepsy? Have problems with vertigo? Are you a human being with eyeballs? This movie hates you.

The 'found footage' aspect of it was done in the worst way possible. And this is a pretty terrible aspect to start with. But when someone in the background is saying fervently, "See this? Oh man oh...oh my jeez man look at this!" and all I'm seeing is black and some flashes of unbearably bright light right in my eyeballs while the camera spins drunkenly around so badly I'm wondering if they didn't strap it to a cat on Ecstasy, kick the poor beast into traffic and say "Cut, print, beautiful!"? AWFUL.

Jesus, even in the simple walking-around scenes I was praying that they'd hold the goddamn camera still for half a second so I could empty the puke bucket. I had to close my eyes for a good ten minutes and try to follow the narrative by sound cues just so I didn't hurl my sandwich onto the carpet.

Which brings up the near total lack of narrative. I'm not going to spoil anything, because there's nothing -to- spoil. Hack film-makers with hack writers cooked up a half-baked concept with a bunch of meaningless 'twists' that M. Night Shyamalanadingdong would be embarrassed by that don't mean anything and looks like barfed up cat food on film.

Fellow Horror fans...do NOT watch this movie. This movie hates you. Because that's the only conceivable excuse I can think of for it even to exist.