The movie starts off showing a scene with a woman alone in a room, who is attacked by something neither she nor we can see. She gets hanged in the stairways, and a black envelope drops to the floor. We then fast forward to a year later, when a group of friends (Sid, Kira, and Harris) have attended a funeral and decides to go drinking afterwards. Drunk and stupid, they decide to do something silly that can only be brought on by drunken stupidity: they first break into the Crescent View Cemetery. Their original plan was to just say their final goodbyes to the recently departed, but Sid finds a black envelope amongst some of the flowers on the grave. Inside is a poem which urges them to be joyful and to dance upon the graves. And of course, since they’ve already gotten quite sloshed by now, they think this sounds like an excellent idea in order to celebrate life. And so….they start dancing on graves…
Later, mysterious things start happening to the friends. Harris and his wife Allison start hearing strange sounds at night, and suddenly have creepy visions. Kira starts getting attacked by an entity that bites and assaults her, and Sid experiences unexpected fires. Eventually they get in contact with some paranormal investigators, who thinks that they awoke something when they danced on the graves.
The Gravedancers is directed by Mike Mendez, who also directed the cheesy spider-creature-feature flick Big Ass Spider. It starts off in a very routine-like fashion, where we get an ominous start showing us that something sinister is going on, followed by some people making a stupid mistake, and then shit starts hitting the fan. You needn’t see many supernatural horror movies in order to recognize this formula, but what matters is how it spins the movie around it. So, how does The Gravedancers do in that regard? Well…
First off, the story isn’t half-bad. It’s not very original, but it works, and I actually liked the revealed reason for why they get haunted in the way they do. Much of the story is simple but it’s not a completely hackneyed entry into the supernatural horror genre, it does have a few things of its own. When it comes to scenery, I gotta give some props with using actual locations for the filming. The filmmakers sought out houses that were going to be demolished/burned (in South Carolina, it’s common to burn down abandoned/condemned houses) and asked if they could film there before they were burned down. The location for the hospital, however, was not an abandoned place, but actually a convalescent home (a place where people are recovering from illness or medical treatments). During the shooting at that place, the filmmakers received numerous complaints about the loud screaming and dangerous stunts. Not sure how shooting a horror film in a place where people are supposed to recover and need some quiet and peace was considered a good idea, but what the hey…you take what you can get, I guess.
Regarding the effects and ghosts, they are…incredibly cheesy, actually. There’s even a scene with a giant flying disembodied head chasing a car, something that would be perfect in a Ghostbusters movie (or a Goosebumps episode), but considering how the movie takes itself somewhat seriously, this scene actually caught me a bit off-guard. However, it was said that the Disney ride The Haunted Mansion was a major inspiration to the film and design of the ghosts, so that explains a few things…
While The Gravedancers does come off a bit as a run-of-the-mill supernatural horror flick, it does have its moments, I gotta give it that. It’s not great, it’s typical B-grade horror, and its (unintentional or not) cheese-factor is actually one of its redeeming factors.
Director: Mike Mendez
Writers: Brad Keene, Chris Skinner
Country & year: USA, 2006
Actors: Dominic Purcell, Josie Maran, Clare Kramer, Marcus Thomas, Tchéky Karyo, Megahn Perry, Martha Holland, Oakley Stevenson, Samantha MacIvor, Jack Mulcahy, Jim McKeny, Geneva Avarett-Short, Bob McHone
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0435653/
Welcome to Z movie hour. Today we take a look at a micro-budget and campy sci-fi schlockfest with an evil alien and his lazer gun, made by amateur filmmaker Don Dohler, starring his neighbours, brother-in-laws, himself, and his two sons.
What does Jason, Pinhead, Leprechaun and Dracula have in common? They’ve been into space. And this has to be the worst of them all. Good grief.
Mary Elnor is a young woman being accused of Witchcraft in Banfield, Massachusetts, in 1845. She is being hanged from a tree, and then lit on fire by an angry mob, who also bounds her spirit to the body of a doll before she takes her final breath.
John Trent used to be a freelance insurance investigator, who is now a patient in a psychiatric hospital. One day, Dr. Wrenn visits him, where Trent recounts his story: after the disappearance of the popular horror novelist Sutter Cane, Trent is having lunch with a colleague. Suddenly, Trent is attacked by an axe-wielding man who is shot dead by the police, and is later revealed to be Cane’s agent. This man went insane after reading one of Cane’s books, and killed his family as a result. And he is not the only one…apparently, some people seem to go crazy after reading Cane’s novels. Shortly afterwards, Trent is hired by the director of Arcane Publishing who wants him to investigate Cane’s disappearance, and also to recover the manuscript for his final novel. Linda Styles, who is Cane’s editor, is assigned to accompany him. While she explains to Trent that Cane’s novels are known to cause paranoia, disorientation and memory loss in some readers, Trent believes it’s all hogwash and considers his disappearance to be a bluff, something done entirely as a publicity stunt. But bizarre phenomena starts happening, and during their investigation, Trent and Linda enters a small town which looks like and includes people that are exactly as described in one of Cane’s fictional novels. Is it all staged, or is something else at play?
Judith Albright suffers a stroke on her 70th birthday, and is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She is moved to a nursing home, a beautiful old-fashioned mansion. While her grandson opposes the move, both Judith and her daughter Barbara insists that this is what will be best for everyone. Judith is a given a room which she shares with another woman. Her roommate is called Annette, but she is nothing but a disturbed, babbling fool who clutches her bible like her life depends on it. Upon staying at the home for a short while, Judith is starting to witness strange behaviour in several of the residents, but doesn’t think much of it, considering that many of the people there are suffering from dementia and are prone to be confused and acting strangely. She befriends a group of other residents whom she starts playing bridge with, and things seem to be rather well…until one evening, when Annette is more disturbed than ever, especially after the cat Ozzie jumps into her bed. That night, Judith wakes up and sees a dark shadow leaning over Annette, and no one believes her about what she’s seen. When Annette dies and Judith also starts seeing that shadow creature in the bedroom, she knows something is very wrong at the nursing home, but of course…no one will believe an old, confused woman…
We are in one of the darker corners of Hollywood, Los Angeles, where the young man Raymond Everett (Lenny Von Dohlen) owns a horror-themed wax museum. One day he gets some new deliveries, all the way from Romania, one of which is a casket that contains something you’ll never guess what – Vanessa, Dracula’s widow (Sylvia Kristel). Yes, a living, bloodsucking vampire. So why has she gotten herself all the way over to Los Angeles, you may wonder? No one knows. She doesn’t know, the script doesn’t know, even the Man Who Knows poster we see on the wall on Raymond’s apartment, doesn’t know. So where do we go from here? Who knows.
Jessica is a recently widowed woman, who has decided to move on with her life and start afresh. While traveling, she encounters a suspicious-looking guy multiple times. Hoping that it’s all a coincidence, things become pretty evident when she crashes her car due to a slashed tire. The creep who has been stalking her manages to drug and kidnap her, and the cat ‘n mouse game has started.
