Movie Review - Grave Encounters

I really love found footage films, there's a new one coming out, The Chernobyl Diaries, about a group of friends who go on a tour of an abandoned city near the Chernobyl disaster and end up stranded there as night falls when they realize that the bus that took them there has broken down (whatever evil being that is lurking in the ghost town fucked with the car!).

So while waiting for that movie to be released, I decided to check out another found footage movie, Grave Encounters, last night and it was pretty good.

Here's the plot summary:

Lance Preston and the crew of "Grave Encounters", a ghost-hunting reality television show, are shooting an episode inside the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, where unexplained phenomena has been reported for years. All in the name of good television, they voluntarily lock themselves inside the building for the night and begin a paranormal investigation, capturing everything on camera. They quickly realize that the building is more than just haunted - it is alive - and it has no intention of ever letting them leave. They find themselves lost in a labyrinth maze of endless hallways and corridors, terrorized by the ghosts of the former patients. They soon begin to question their own sanity, slipping deeper and deeper into the depths of madness, ultimately discovering the truth behind the hospital's dark past...and taping what turns out to be their final episode. 

So after watching the movie, I couldn't sleep last night. Idk man, the movie did have some pretty good scares but after watching it, I wasn't like scared to be alone in the dark by myself or anything. Then later when I went to bed, I couldn't stop thinking about it, I would fall asleep and then wake up again a few hours later with the movie still in my mind, I even had a dream about the movie (the dream didn't even make any sense so I'm not typing it out here lol). I think it's because it didn't have a conclusive ending.

Like how was the footage found? What happened when the caretaker guy came to unlock the doors at 6.00 am? What did he find? Did he find their equipment all intact but no trace of the crew? Or did he find their bodies there or something? Inquiring minds want to know.


Parts of the movie that creeped me out

• It was 2 hours past the time when the caretaker was supposed to come and unlock the doors, and there was no sign of him, and it continued to be dark out.
• The crew forced the front door open with the gurney and found more hospital hallways instead of the street. The other side of the door had the 'Death Awaits' graffiti that they saw when they were going in. That was when you knew they had literally no way out and were just basically waiting to killed by one of the spirits.
• The guy who was playing the psychic got separated from the rest while they were running away from a ghost and had to find his way back to the group in the dark as he didn't have a torchlight. Through the night vision camera they installed earlier, we see things like doors moving on its own around him and then later he gets choked by an invisible force and then slammed upwards into the ceiling.
• The host goes off to look for something to wedge the elevator door open and on his way out of the room he spots a bloody tongue on the floor and a few drops of blood drip down from above, he looks up and sees the camera guy who disappeared earlier crouching on the ceiling like a spider and his mouth was all bloody, damn, that really made me jump.
• While the group is arguing a figure sprints across the hall into another room in the background and they run after it thinking it's their friend that disappeared earlier. Instead they find a blond girl in a hospital gown, standing eerily facing the wall, Blair Witch project style. Then she turns around and her face is like this:

OMG you guys don't even go here!

The face kinda spoiled it for me. Yes, it's pretty scary, I mean, I'm having a hard time typing this out as this face stares at me from the screen, but it's also screams bad CGI and that kinda takes you out of the movie. It looks like those scary faces they use in videos on Youtube, usually named 'REAL GHOST CAUGHT ON CAMERA MUST WATCH!!!!' or something. It would probably be better if the crew just freaked the fuck out when they see a ghost girl standing there in the room and run away screaming and the sound of a ghostly howl is heard behind them.