The Graves

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!".

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.

I found this movie to have potential, but it's badly executed. The story is interesting with a mining town that has its people sacrifice strangers for a supernatural entity to feed on it. I wish the movie would go into the history of the mining place and why they need to sacrifice people for the entity. They briefly said it before the climax of the movie. Unfortunately, the movie isn't interesting at all because it's rather predictable and does have that much in the story. Most of the movie is just the two sisters getting chased by the villains and sometimes fighting back. It does have some suspenseful moments in those scenes, but nothing too big or interesting happens during it. Even the movie feels like it keeps going on for a little bit too long and is not that enjoyable. The climax itself is underwhelming and is anticlimactic on how it ends. The characters aren't really the worst, but aren't that interesting at all. I found the special effects to be a mixed bag throughout the movie. The way the entity feast on the deceased body looks pretty terrifying, but the CGI effects look really bad. Gore effects are also a mixed bag with some have pretty good practical effects, but the digital gore effects look mediocre.

The Graves have potential with its concept, but the execution is badly done on the direction they go with this movie. The movie does have recognizable actors in it, but they barely appear that much in the movie.

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.

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.