Greystone Park

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 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.

As much as I dislike these shoddy shot movies with their questionable camera work and their supposedly "found footage" concept, then "Greystone Park" (aka "The Asylum Tapes") is definitely in the top five of the more boring and pointless movies in the genre that I have had the misfortune to stumble upon.

The story here, is as in so many other low budget movies, about a group of people venturing into a run-down, old, abandoned mental institution (or asylum, if you will) to investigate some alleged rumors about it being haunted.

Right, that is perhaps one of the most used and generic of story lines in the history of horror movies. And you'd think with so many movies with the same storyline that there would be a bigger chance for someone to actually get the recipe just right. You would, wouldn't you? Indeed, but "Greystone Park" swung and missed widely.

The movie is mostly just questionable camera work that was all over the place, and randomly interrupted by static noise to make the atmosphere seem all the more ghastly and scary. But it just didn't work. The movie came off as horribly rushed and forcefully pushed together in what seemed like an array of random clips.

I will say that the setting of the movie was actually what worked out the best for the movie. Although you'd think that a run-down and closed down mental institution would have its equipment and gear long looted and gone. But oddly enough, a lot of things were still there. Which just didn't really seem all that believable.

As for the acting, well people actually did good enough jobs with their given roles, although they were struggling hard having no proper storyline to work with.

If you enjoy these types of movies, perhaps you can find something enjoyable here, as I failed to. If you, like me, want to be properly entertained by a movie with proper camera work, then you are better off looking elsewhere.

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 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.