Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

Grave Encounters 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

Warning: Found Footage Films Can Drive You Crazy.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 7, 2013

The history of attempts to treat various mental illnesses is littered with some of the most horrific stories imaginable, which may be one reason why offerings set in mental hospitals have been such a staple in the horror genre especially. This season’s American Horror Story is only one of the latest examples, but films dating back to at least The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari have attempted to exploit various aspects of mental illness and, often, the “treatments” that various patients were subjected to. Some of these films have had a serious intent (one thinks of outings like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Snake Pit or Lilith), while others are so over the top they sometimes defy description (Shock Corridor). One film supposedly dealing with mental illness and an unimaginably brutal “treatment” actually radically changed my life in a rather unexpected way. When I saw Frances, about long ago film and theater star Frances Farmer (and not so coincidentally starring American Horror Story's Jessica Lange, who must have a "thing" for institutions), I was revolted by what I at the time thought was an accurate depiction of the actress’ life, which in the film ended with her receiving a terrifying ice pick lobotomy and living out her life in zombiefied pacification. That set me off on literally decades of research debunking the film and its source novel, which resulted in a glut of international media coverage from everyone from A&E to NPR to too many print publications to list. I was a frankly naïve young man at the beginning of this odyssey, only too willing to believe the “based on a true story” imprimatur that started that film, and so I was quite shocked to discover over years of poring through court, medical and personal records that a lot of the film was just plain made up, including the horrifying lobotomy. (I should add that my sister was a Psychiatric Social Worker at Medicine Lake, AKA Eastern State Hospital—ironically the “sister” institution to Western State Hospital where Farmer was a patient for years in the forties —and I spent one terrifying summer as a child accompanying my sister to her job. There is absolutely no denying that older state institutions are very scary places.) And so I’m perhaps a bit more sensitive to depictions of the horrors of mental institutions than the average person. There is no denying that many of the so-called “treatments” that were championed through the years look to us now to be absolutely barbaric (and I would be the first to include lobotomy among those horrors). But there is also no denying that in most cases, the doctors and nurses who were attempting to treat patients were not some Grand Guignol leering villains but concerned professionals who were doing the best they could with their understanding of the problem at the time. It’s obviously easy to cast a powerful psychiatrist or nurse as a representative of evil incarnate, but the truth is, as with so many things, considerably more mundane.

There’s actually a salient connection between Frances and Grave Encounters 2, for lobotomy plays at least a tangential part in this low budget horror romp, and in fact the film’s wonderfully named Dr. Freaken is obviously modeled on Dr. Walter Freeman, the notorious “inventor” of the ice pick lobotomy and the man who supposedly operated on Frances Farmer (he didn’t). There’s a chilling scene late in the film when Dr. Freaken performs an ice pick lobotomy and then goes on to another even more horrific act, and so it’s tempting to pun horribly and twist one of the most famous quotes from Frances and say “Lobotomy gets ‘em home video.”

The major problem with Grave Encounters 2 is that it takes forever (or at least around 35 or so minutes) for this film to kick into high gear and get to what most people will have come to see—a bunch of idiots trapped in a mental institution getting killed in a number of gruesome ways. The film actually gets off to a fairly amusing start with a bunch of online critics (and you know how they can be) offering their hugely disparate opinions of the first Grave Encounters. The last of these turns out to be the focal character of Grave Encounters 2, student filmmaker Alex Wright (Richard Harmon, Judas Kiss, Continuum: Season One). Wright it turns out is obsessed with Grave Encounters and the first half hour or so of the film follows him as he attempts to figure out what happened to the last pile of corpses left in the oh, so spooky mental institution.

In the meantime Alex is working on his own horror film, and in fact some of the most enjoyable moments in Grave Encounters 2 are the unabashedly bad snippets from this supposed project we see being filmed. In fact had The Vicious Brothers (as this film’s screenwriters are credited) concentrated more on the goofy comedy on display in these segments, Grave Encounters 2 might have been a much more compelling feature.

Need it even be mentioned that Alex and several of his cohorts end up breaking into the mental institution to find out what happened the last time, only to become ensnared in horrifying events themselves? And that brings us to the central problem with Grave Encounters 2: it simply isn’t very scary. We’ve seen far too many of these “found footage” movies by this time to be scared by people screaming at unseen elements going bump in the night or even more melodramatically hysterical first person apologies delivered directly to the camera shortly before that character meets their grisly demise. This might have seemed daring and provocative in The Blair Witch Project, but the only scary thing about it at this late date is that people are still trying to cash in on this tired conceit.

Grave Encounters 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Grave Encounters is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of New Video and Tribeca Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. It's kind of pointless to talk about the typical items we discuss in these reviews, things like fine detail and shadow detail, contrast and color accuracy, because this is supposed to look like—well, like crap a lot of the time. The first part of the film actually features some relatively sharp imagery, as Alex goes about investigating what happened during the first Grave Encounters. However even this first segment is littered with supposed minicam shots that have the appropriate 8mm (or whatever the newfangled digital equivalent is) look. Once things get into the mental institution, the entire film becomes dark to the point of rarely being able to clearly make things out in the frame, which of course was done intentionally to turn up the anxiety level. Some sequences are in black and white, while other are ostensibly in color, though even the color sequences rarely pop with very vivid hues. The visual effects are kind of middling, though a nice refracted prismatic lens look is utilized quite effectively in the climax.

Grave Encounters 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Grave Encounters features both a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix. The 5.1 mix rather smartly offers discrete channelization in a number of well done sound effects, and a low frequency rumble often spills through all of the surrounds at key sequences, a trite but still effective way to create tension. Dialogue is very cleanly presented and the mix is very well prioritized, though there is of course a lot of screaming and profanity laden shouts of terror sprinkled liberally throughout the film. Dynamic range is quite wide courtesy of some of the sound effects.

Grave Encounters 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview With the Vicious Brothers (1080i; 3:27). They're not brothers and they're not especially articulate, but here they are anyway.

Grave Encounters 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're a fan of these "found footage" films, chances are you'll like Grave Encounters 2, at least once you get past the seemingly interminable setup. But this is a pretty cliché ridden exercise, something The Vicious Brothers obviously knew going in, as is evidenced by their rather funny send ups of the genre courtesy of Alex's student film in the early going. You know what you're going to get with a property like this, and so while there's really no big surprises in store here, Grave Encounters 2 delivers on its own small scale ambitions. But if I'm going to watch a movie about a mad fictional lobotomist, I'll just pop in my DVD of Frances.