Grave Secrets

This movie begins with a woman named "Iris Norwood" (Renee Soutendijk) driving a car with an older man sitting beside her and he is apparently in some pain. He suddenly attacks her and she escapes by leaping out of the fast-moving car just before it crashes into a large tree. Three months later a college professor by the name of "David Shaw" (Paul Le Mat) is lecturing his students about a paranormal experience with a spirit of the dead when he notices a visitor leaving his class at the very end. The visitor just happens to be Iris. Eventually, David and Iris meet and she tells him that the bed & breakfast that she owns is haunted. What then transpires is a ghost story which starts off slow but builds in intensity until the very end. Unfortunately, the last 10 minutes or so of the film has too many details thrown in without enough detail for the audience to assimilate. Now, this movie definitely has some good horror mixed with a little comedy here and there but again the ending could have been handled better. Slightly below average.

There are three writers credited with the script. None of them seem to know how a normal human being would react in any given situation and the director doesn't seem to care. At least one of them wanted this to be a comedy.

The actors aren't bad ones, but their performances are so forced that it's painful to watch. Then again, they are playing unrealistic, idiotic characters speaking ridiculous dialogue, so it's difficult to blame them.

You'll want to strangle each one of them personally while watching this. David Warner's part in this is small, so be warned if you're hoping to see a lot of him. You won't.

If it hadn't been for the general premise, the camera work and lighting, the passable effects, and a half-decent score, I would not have kept watching. I don't know how many times I said, "Oh dumb," and "This doesn't make any sense!"

If you make it to the end, you'll be shaking your head in disbelief, wondering how something like this got made, and potentially laughing your ass off at the ridiculousness of it. I can't recommend this mess to anyone.

Renée Soutendijk was a very popular actress in The Netherlands and Belgium, where I grew up during the 80s and early 90s, and a beloved sex-symbol thanks to her roles in local cult-classics like "Spetters" and "De Vierde Man". At the end of the 80s, she aspired an international career, but it was over very quickly, and I still don't fully understand why, because the few movies she made in the US were interesting; like this "Grave Secrets" and the Sci-Fi thriller "Eve of Destruction". She's a good actress, and her English is almost completely accent-free, which can't be said from most Dutch performers trying their luck in Hollywood.

That being said, "Grave Secrets" is a sorely lacking and disappointing horror. Especially for being produced in the late 80s, the film doesn't nearly deliver enough in the gore and sleaze department, and this despite numerous shocking & controversial themes in the plot (incest, rape, baby murder, ...). The main and obvious problem is that all the good stuff is saved up until the final 10-15 minutes. The first 70 minutes are far too dull, vague, and bloodless. The most exhilarating thing happening for a long time is a ghostly force throwing a raw egg in the face of paranormal investigator Paul Le Mat, go figure! The climax is fun, with a glorious over-the-top role for stunt man Bob Herron, but it comes too little too late to fix everything.

Holy moly, was this hard to get through. I have to confess to watching it in two parts and, by the time I'd got round to watching the second half, I'd pretty much forgotten what had gone on before. I decided to start again from the beginning until I realised that nothing much of any interest had happened and I could just skip back to the midway point where I'd originally left off.

It feels like one of those 'made-for-TV' movies based off a Stephen King story that seemed to be very popular in the eighties. Those weren't very good - and yet they were head and shoulders over this offering. It's about a woman who's troubled by a ghost and, seeing as the 'Ghostbusters' were obviously way too busy to help out, she enlists the help of a college professor with an interest in the paranormal.

And, er, that's about it for the most part. Almost nothing happens until about ten minutes before the end. The characters are ugly (meow!) and they do quite dumb things. It looks like the film-makers put everything into one make-up scene a few almost passable special effects right at the end. But that was way too little too late to make this worth sitting through.

Grave Secrets is a fairly routine paranormal mystery with some dated ghostly special effects, but it does develop into a deliciously twisted tale towards the end, so hang in there: Iris Norwood (Renée Soutendijk) is bothered by spooky occurrences at her bed and breakfast home, so she enlists the help of paranormal expert David Shaw (Paul Le Mat). Staying at the B&B for a few days, David witnesses the strange events first hand and slowly unravels the mystery behind the haunting - it transpires that Iris is being terrorised by the headless ghost of her abusive father Kurt, who raped her and made her pregnant, and then buried her baby alive after she gave birth!!! That's some seriously unhinged stuff right there!

Since much of the film is rather sedate, with the spooky stuff limited to floating books and records, patience is definitely required, but there is a modicum of fun to be had along the way with David's dippy fashion disaster PA Darla (Olivia Barash), who tries to attract her boss's attention by bending over in front of him in a short skirt, and with David Warner as a medium, who conducts a seance in the haunted house. The final act finally delivers the more demented stuff, as David and Iris follow Kurt's ghost to find out where he buried baby Brian; however, they must do battle with her zombified father when a local guy inadvertently reunites the spook with his missing head! Naff '90s visual FX abound.