Review:

We open with a menagerie of review clips of the first movie. They are real life reviews (I only know because Shawn C. Phillips is one of them and I'd watched the review), some positive, but mostly negative ones pointing out how bad the effects were. Grave Encounters 2 is one film student's quest to prove that Grave Encounters wasn't just a movie, but was a real set of events. The movie is only about an hour and a half and it takes half an hour to actually get to the hospital from the first movie. I can appreciate that they put the effort in to create a more compelling story for a sequel than just throwing essentially the same movie at us again, but it takes up far too much time. Pairing with that, the fact that most of those first thirty minutes is just character establishment for characters that are all unlikable. I don't give half a crap about any of these people; they are all annoying jerks and the actors aren't particularly great either. Am I really supposed to care about Dylan Playfair? Am I supposed to care about the love angle between two of our leads? No one is likable and the only person who did an acceptable acting job was Richard Harmon. I'm not sure why they thought bringing up how bad the effects were in the first movie was a good idea if they weren't going to make them any better in t his film. They are smart enough to only show the worst effects through the night vision camera, but even then it's still pretty awful. The plot for the first movie was pretty messy, but this sequel is a disaster. Without spoiling anything, they make some real leaps in logic and try some outrageous ideas. There are many, many movies that are much worse than this one, but Grave Encounters 2 didn't learn anything from the mistakes of the first film and actually makes the same mistakes at a worse level in addition to making new ones.