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Reviews
Grave Tales (2004)
Surprisingly Entertaining
My wife will subject me to any unbearable garbage as long as it carries the word "horror" somewhere in the description, so when she brought this home, I was expecting yet another evening of torture. Imagine my surprise when I actually enjoyed this movie, despite the fact that it looks like it was made for less money than I spent on my breakfast this morning.
This was an anthology (well, two stories of marriages on the rocks connected by bookends) that kinda plays like a movie version of Tales From the Dark Side, and I mean that in a good way.
Is it a work of technical brilliance? No, it looks cheap, though there were a few nice flourishes mixed in with some laughable special effects. Was the acting great? Mostly no, but part of the fun in watching this movie I thought was in enjoying a couple of pretty good performances in the midst of a bunch of exhilaratingly bad ones. Bad isn't really a strong enough word.
So am I saying this was a so-bad-it's-good movie? Not really, the stories were pretty decent and I just genuinely enjoyed it. The cheapness of it all just kind of added to the charm. If you like Tales from the Dark Dide, or microbudget movies in general, you may be surprised to find yourself enjoying this movie.
Heebie Jeebies (2005)
Has a certain charm
No, this isn't the great American horror movie, nor will it scare the pants off of you. But it does have a certain charm. The joy in watching this movie is the fun of seeing a group of young people who obviously had no feature-length movie-making experience, and no budget, put their heads together and make the most of what they had to work with.
The plot is a confused mess and defies all logic, as any other review of this movie will correctly tell you, but it did do one thing that a lot of much bigger budget horror movies I've seen in the past few years failed to do - it entertained me.
The wrap-around plot is nonsensical, some craziness about a girl getting a bunch of high school friends together in the most unsafe, isolated place she can find, because she's had dreams about their deaths that she thinks will come true, and she wants to protect them - by tricking them into gathering in the most unsafe, isolated place she can find.
Then we are thrust into her dreams, shown as three vignettes that could really stand alone as short films, which has led to this movie, for better or worse, being tagged with the "anthology" label. The first dream is kind of lame. The second one, though it doesn't really fit in with the film, if pretty amusing. The third vignette, however, is sharp and creepy, and contains the best performances in the movie.
The overall quality of the acting is better than one would expect for a no-budget movie, and there are some real flashes of cleverness in the direction. With a higher budget, these guys could probably put together a pretty good movie.
If you take it's lack of a budget into account, and you go into the movie with the attitude that you're going to enjoy it for what it is rather than question it, you'll probably get some enjoyment out of it.
And it has a cool twist ending that I did not see coming at all.