Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Grave Encounters (I and II)

Netflix recommended these to me, and I watched the first one last night and the second one today.

The premise of the first one: a television crew goes to the abandoned, fictitious "Collingwood" mental institution, to film things that go bump in the night.  Spoiler: the crew ends up going bump in the night.  Only it's more drawn out than that.

  • There are some good scares
  • I bet that would be a really scary thing to do
  • Also a stupid thing to do
  • But the kind of thing television crews like to do
  • I bet this would have been good to see in the theater, but when you go back and watch the scary scenes frame by frame, the special effects are WEAK
  • As mentioned before, I've seen Paranormal Activity about 100 times.  One thing that movie has over this movie is more stationary footage - this movie has WAY TOO MUCH footage of people running while holding handheld cameras.  We get it, it's about a television crew, slow down and let us see what's happening for the love of God.
  • Otherwise, decent.
The premise of the second one: a film student doubts the reality of the first movie and takes his pals to "Collingwood" to check it out.
  • Second verse, nowhere near as good as the first
  • And the first wasn't the best thing I ever saw
  • This one MENTIONS how stupid the special effects were in the first one, and then proceeds to have...WORSE special effects?  That shouldn't be allowed.
  • They're supposed to be 10 years apart.  Which is ridiculous: they were released ONE year apart and have the same stupid technology, filmwise, in both of them.
Released: 2011 and 2012, respectively
Availability: DVD and streaming
Reason I watched: Netflix recommended

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