Anyway, given how much unprecedented stuff is going on right now, I thought now would be as good a time as any to try something I’ve never really done before. As I’ve pretty well established by now, I’m really picky about found-footage films, pretty much over films set in abandoned hospitals, and am really not a fan of sequels or (ugh) franchises. But last week I discovered that I liked Grave Encounters – a found-footage film set in an abandoned mental hospital - well enough, so I thought, why not keep this train rolling and take a look at the sequel?
What little critical reception I’ve seen of Grave Encounters 2 has been mixed, which is unsurprising to me, given that I think sequels to horror films are bad ideas in general. And some of that certainly comes into play here, though it does make some smart choices along the way as well. I am going to put this one under a spoiler bracket, though, since I anticipate I’ll be talking about the events of the first film and specific things I did and didn’t like about it, so if you haven’t watched Grave Encounters and plan to, maybe hold off on reading this one until you’ve had a look at it.
The film opens fast, with a barrage of YouTube movie critics praising or panning Grave Encounters for being one of the best (or worst) films they’ve ever seen, establishing that this film takes place in a world where the film Grave Encounters exists as a commercial release. This montage cuts to some camcorder footage from a costume party on a college campus, your standard teen debauchery type stuff, narrated by a fratty cameraman, before the camera winds back down the hallway to the bedroom of one of those YouTube critics. The critic is named Alex, and the bro behind the camera is his friend Trevor. As it turns out, they’re film students, and Alex is the kind of guy who, when presented with an opportunity to chat up Jen, a young woman in whom he’s interested (and who reciprocates that interest), instead ends up getting entirely too drunk, ranting about the lack of visionaries in horror film today, passing out and getting teabagged. He’s young, a little too full of himself, and maybe slightly pathetic – enough where you feel bad for the humiliation he suffers when the aftermath of the party hits social media, but at the same time, you can kind of see where he walked into it.
This impression isn’t at all helped by the glimpses we get of Alex’s horror film project, presented as dailies inserted alongside all of the other footage we’ve seen. For as much as he complained about a lack of vision in modern horror, Alex’s work isn’t any more groundbreaking. The first glimpse we get owes a lot to the teen sex and wooden acting of 80s slasher films, and the second glimpse owes just as much to the abandoned warehouse and jittery editing of the Saw films, choices I feel had to have been made on purpose, indicative that the same sense of self-awareness that helped the first film is still present here. But Alex, to his credit, isn’t any happier with what he’s getting. There’s at least some creative ambition at work here. Alex wasn’t much of a fan of Grave Encounters, dismissing it as a lame attempt to copycat The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, but after a YouTube commenter messages him a set of coordinates in response to his Grave Encounters review, his interest is piqued.
As Alex starts looking more into the film, he discovers that almost everyone involved with its production has all ended up either missing or dead, and the coordinates lead to an abandoned mental hospital in Vancouver that bears a striking resemblance to the one featured in the film. The discovery that the producer featured in the first film was the actual producer, and released the film to recoup costs from settlements with families of people involved in the production doesn’t help any.
As it turns out, Grave Encounters wasn’t a work of fiction after all, and so Alex, Trevor, Jen, and their friends Jared and Tessa have a new direction for their horror film project, complete with location.
Because of course they’re going to the hospital. This is where it becomes clear that it’s got a tougher job ahead of it as a sequel because now we already have a pretty good idea of what the rhythms are going to be – there will be spooky paranormal stuff, then ghosts, people will disappear or die, and then the protagonists - like those in the first film – will discover what’s causing all of this to happen. And, to its detriment, I think, that’s pretty much how it goes, with the same locations from the first film featuring as well. As in the first film, some parts are more effective than others - the ghosts tend to look too artificial, and their sequences feel more perfunctory than in the original, and because we’re expecting the hospital’s structure to change around the protagonists, it’s no surprise when it starts to do that.
It’s really frustrating, because the fundamentals of the film feel solid. The acting isn’t bad - a little caricatured in places, Trevor is definitely a frat boy archetype, Alex is the film-obsessed nerd, and Tessa, Jared, and Jen aren’t especially indistinguishable, but it never really tips over into cartoon territory. The first film had a problem with pacing to a degree, and this one moves along at a snappy pace, making use of natural breaks in footage (as well as sourcing everything from raw camera footage, including CCTV cameras, buttonhole spy cameras, and phone cameras in places, so the conceit that what we’re seeing is found footage doesn’t really falter) to shift quickly from scene to scene, doing some clever things with perspective in places as well. The filmmakers do a lot right in areas that found-footage films tend to get wrong. I mean, as soon as shit starts getting weird, there’s very little “oh, we need to document all of this” nonsense. They instead decide to hightail it out of there like sensible people, and their fear largely feels real and palpable, carrying tension when the supernatural stuff largely fails to surprise.
But, along with there not being too many surprises here, since all of the basics were established in the first film, this film does something else I really don’t like - it dives into mythology and backstory. One of the things I didn’t like about the first one was how it framed all of the strange goings-on as the work of not just a mad scientist, but a mad scientist performing occult rituals. This is what I meant about overreach in my post on the first film. You have a mental hospital with a history of suffering and abuse as a setting, and as Session 9 established, that’s plenty. Shit, you just need to search out a documentary like Titicut Follies to see how close to the mark a horror film can get without any embellishment. A haunted hospital where walls and doors appear and disappear and hallways don’t always go where they’re supposed to, effectively trapping people inside, where space and time become unmoored? There’s plenty of potential there alone. Add some subtle, restrained spectral appearances and you’ve got something. You don’t need to have a mad scientist doing weird shit in a basement.
The end result feels like it’s trying too hard, and leaning into that stuff to the extent that the sequel does really weakens the third act. When the focus should be on the people trapped inside, futilely trying to find their way out and falling victim to what still roams the halls, instead there’s explanation and the start of world-building, which is the surest way to dilute what you’re trying to accomplish, and though there are some effective motifs and scenes in the last act, they’re broken up too much by too much exposition in the place of action, and some really cheap and goofy effects and props that just serve to highlight how much the location was responsible for setting the mood. As a result, it ends limply and obviously, sort of becoming in the last act what I was afraid the whole thing would be from the start. Like the first one it started strong, only to go too far, as if it didn’t think what it was giving us would be enough on its own.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
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