Greystone Park

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 am afraid to say, that although I watched the film this evening, my brain found it hard to comprehend the dullness that was thrust upon it, and so images of the film are already leaking away as I type this so sorry for lack of info. I am a huge fan of found footage films, which is the reason I got this. I was hoping for at least Grave Encounters level of film but instead got college student attempt at horror film... My main problems with this film is that nothing much happens, they keep shouting at each other over naff all, and you can't see a bloody thing a lot of the time! I paid 8 quid to look at darkness while people shout. I could get the same effect by hiding in an alley at night and occasionally jumping out at people while screaming boo, for free! I am being rather nice with a 2, but if I gave it a 1 I would feel even more depressed about paying the amount I did for it...

This will sound harsh but "Greystone Park" (or "The Asylum Tapes" if you're outside the US) is comfortably among the worst movies I have ever seen.

No real plot, no thrills, no frights, no nothing.

Bad acting (I mean really, really bad), bad sound, bad camera work and even worse editing. I fully appreciate that the film is supposed to be a "found tapes" film - but that is no excuse to produce a 90+ minute film of which most of it you can't actually see what's going on. Adding loud bangs to the footage you can't see doesn't scare anybody above the age of four - not in the year 2012 anyway.

Sean Stone's father Oliver is a talented movie maker and one of the more important directors of the 20th century. This piece of garbage might be Stone Jr's first, last and only contribution to the annals of cinematic history.

I'm thinking about changing my user name to "Bad movie watcher" because of my incredible and uncanny ability to watch bad movies through to completion. There have been the occasional stinkers that I couldn't bear and turned off midway, but by and large I gut it out.

This bad movie is a found footage film taking place in an abandoned mental hospital. To use a baseball term, the movie starts off in the hole with an 0-2 count.

Although found footage films have significantly improved over the years, this one is of the type I can't stand. This is the single camera, POV, amateur video. So, what do you get with that? Quick scans, out of focus, and shaky. Then, whoever edited it made it more unwatchable with constant cuts from shot to shot. It's enough to give you a headache. There were plenty of times when I didn't know who was holding the camera because different people would be in the shot when they weren't before. And tell me, how does a found footage video have a musical overlay for intensity? Granted it was subtle and brief but it still detracts from the overall principle.

The movie took too long to get going and offered very little in the scare department. Ultimately, you had three ghost seeking youngsters that found just that and paid the price. It was all rather cliché. At one point, at the beginning of the movie, someone even said: "This is how all horror movies start," when commenting on a ominous shot of some old homes--almost as if the movie was making fun of itself. Really poor taste.

There's nothing cutting edge, nothing original, nothing redeemable about this movie. I'll stay away from the overused: "That's (x amount of my time) of my life I can't get back," because I made the choice to watch it. But what baffles me is: what is cool as a stunt isn't always cool as a movie. Why did they think this could make a good film? "Greystone Park" could've done a lot better as a 15 minute YouTube clip.

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.