Grave Encounters 2 (2012)

The Gist: Set 9 years after the events and disappearances of Lance Preston and the Grave Encounters crew, film student Alex is obsessed with finding out the truth about what happened in the asylum.  His search leads him and his friends to the edge of terror and madness and it’s all caught on film.

Ghosts Hunters & Filmmakers: Richard Harmon (Alex Wright), Leanne Lapp (Jennifer Parker), Dylan Playfair (Trevor Thompson), Howie Lai (Jared Lee), Stephanie Bennett (Tessa Hamill), Ben Wilkinson (Jerry Hartfield), Sean Rogerson (Lance Preston), The Vicious Brothers

Contains Spoilers 

My Take: Second verse, same as the first.  That is how this movie felt, like Grave Encounters but not nearly as interesting or scary.  The first 20ish minutes utterly bored me as we are introduced to the characters who are unlikable, especially the main guy, Alex.  It starts out with shaky cam footage of Alex and his friends first at a party then moving on to a “movie” set as Alex is trying to film his masterpiece featuring his girlfriend Jennifer.  His interest in Grave Encounters soon becomes an obsession as he pursues information about Lance Preston and the production of the movie.  Alex heads to Lance’s house and is then led to L.A. by a mysterious printout that comes from nowhere about a video being shot by the producer of Grave Encounters, Jerry Hartfield.  He says some stuff to Alex, the guy is a total dick, and this convinces Alex that there is more to the story of Lance and Grave Encounters than anyone knows or will admit.

Somehow Alex pieces together information and finds out that the original show was shot in an abandoned asylum in Vancouver, BC, Canada (woo, Vancouver!).  So naturally they road trip to Canucks country and enter the asylum…

And from here there is some of this

And more of this

And by some miracle Lance Preston has survived for 9 years, 9 YEARS, living in an air shaft, eating rats and drawing on the walls.  Pretty buff considering his diet of raw rat.

Once Alex and the others, or who is left, find Lance it is soon discovered that the way out is through murder and getting the tapes or something.  By this point I was only partially watching.  There is some funky Satan worshiping happening in the basement with the ghost of the obligatory sadistic doctor and his naughty nurses and then the cutting of a baby’s throat as a human sacrifice.  Some other shit happens, Lance gets pulled through a portal in the wall -where the hell did that come from – and finally Alex figures out that to be free of the asylum and the ghosts or whatever they are, he must bash his girlfriends’ head apart with a handheld camera and get all the videos from somewhere.  Alex then goes through a cosmic door and ends up walking down a L.A. street in the middle of the night carrying his bag of film.  To end us off, Jerry Hartfield has watched Alex’s footage and has produced and released it as a sequel to Grave Encounters.  He presents the film, with a creepy looking Alex beside him, clearly stating that the events are fictional.

Yah or Nah: Well, I think it’s pretty obvious how I feel about this one.  Nah, I say, Nah.  I don’t really know what it is about the flick that I didn’t like other than the characters and the story that weaved between hauntings, satanic cults and vortexes.  I’m not sure what I was expecting knowing that the movie would take place in the asylum again but I guess I was hoping for a little something different.  Grave Encounters was scary, fun and engaging but Grave Encounters 2 was missing all of those elements.