Hmmm…overacting and underacting all rolled into one!
The Graves (2009)
Directed By: Brian Pulido (There’s Something Out There)
The Prologue
So on paper The Graves doesn’t sound to bad to your average nerdy horror fan. You have favorites Tony Todd and you have Bill Mosely. Also if you didn’t know when the movie says Graves it doesn’t actually mean what you’d find in a graveyard, it’s a pair of attractive comic book loving sisters who have that as their last names. So what’s not to love right?
Well our friends at After Dark released a movie here that very easily shows you what’s not to love.
The Movie
So the Graves (Megan and Abby) are hot geeks to put it in simple terms. Megan just graduated ASU and she’s heading to big city of New York. So the two sisters take a trip to Arizona to seek out an attraction. But when they get side tracked and end up at Skull City they are suckerd into taking a very deadly self-guided tour…Um..yeah?
So what this film does is it try to be all cute, edgy, and cool. And it’s hard to pull that off with the way this one turns out. As if they CGI blood flying everywhere wasn’t bad enough. Bill Mosely pretty much plays Bill Mosely here and that’s always hit and miss but sadly poor Bill missed it here. However, that being said the one highlight you could take from this movie is Tony Todd’s part as the crazy over the top town Preacher. I really did dig that, but not much else I’m sad to report.
While I give this film props for not taking it’s time and dragging it’s feet, the film at times lacks logic. Meaning our leads could have easily been killed a few times early in the film but for reasons I don’t get the killers just let them slide again and again. In one silly part (and this may be minor spoilers so skip here if you want) one of our leads gets wounded, and this leads to both leads being surrounded but it’s not only another wasted time to kill these two, the evil people actually take care of the girls wound before THEN plotting on how to finish her off. So see? Not a lot of sense there.
As if it wasn’t just painfully clear from the start Abby and Megan are our leads so everyone else that crosses their paths that isn’t a killer themselves is just filler placed in the film to add another body to the body count. It become so painfully clear who is going to die next at times that it kinda takes the whole fun out of seeing it.
I know for most of you the idea of two chicks who dig comics might be a hard thing to pass up on, so if you like watching two hot nerdy women running around and over-acting Tony Todd then this will be one for you. If you like a little steak with your sizzle then you might want to pass on The Graves as I’m sure you can do a lot better.
The Conclusion
Well what more could one say? The After Dark Horrorfest is a little hit and miss this year isn’t it? There’s some good, some average, and some bad. This one however is flawed but not the worst I’ve seen. While I did say skip it, it MAY be worth an instant watch someday if available.
But I know for a lot of ya all you’ve seen in this write up is “two nerdy comic book loving hot chicks”.
The Rating (5/10)
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