On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: GRAVE ENCOUNTERS (Tribeca Film).

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS
Or why in the world would anyone spend the night in a creepy, abandoned mental hospital?!
By Cynthia Kane

Ghost stories will never go out of fashion. They’ve enthralled us humans since time began. We all like to be scared; we all like to watch a good thriller; we love horror. Paranormal activity, astral projection, zombies, vampires and connection with the dead are all the rage – see prime time television any night of the week.

So it doesn’t matter whether this film is real or a piece of fiction.

And oh boy… I expected to dislike GRAVE ENCOUNTERS – a kind of rip-off BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, mock-umentary, fake reality show, first-time directed by some guys called the Vicious Brothers.

But you know, I couldn’t help myself; I got into it. It’s scary.

Here we follow a small 20-something crew with a reality show on paranormal activity decides they’ll spend the night at the old and abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital somewhere in Maryland outside Baltimore. The investigating team arrive, already enjoying themselves, laughing, full of skepticism, even though the place purports to be a hotbed of weird, psychic and ghostly phenomenon, given the drastic and unsavory experiments practiced on patients in the 30s, 40s and 50s – lobotomies, weird experiments, etc.

We’re told the place was abandoned in the early 60s. Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson) is our host. He’s invited a renowned (and bogus) psychic, Houston Gray (Mackenzie Gray) to spend the night with him, locked inside, roaming the halls, to claim to feel a presence or two.

They – the ghost hunters and crew – are having a good time of it, until their sound guy suddenly disappears. As they try to find him in the massive complex, what starts off as a quirky night for good ratings turns evil and twisted. Corridors turn into mazes that never end, staircases suddenly lead to nowhere.

Dark, gnarly tunnels and bathrooms with tubs filled with blood and human matter. The entrance doors are locked and the windows open and close at their own will. Objects move and floats, their food rots into disgusting slop. The night never seems to end.