Grave Encounters and Grave Encounters 2 are both mockumentary/found footage horror films on Netflix.  I was shocked how the two were so opposite each other in regards to quality and watchability.

The original Grave Encounters told a story of a new ghost hunting reality show that visits a closed down mental hospital that, supposedly, is haunted.  The team is locked in the hospital over night with the intention that the groundskeeper will release them at dawn.

The problem that dawn doesn't come and the team can't find the exit.  Oh, and a lot of weird shit happens.

Things build slowly in this film, starting with the cliche wheelchairs moving and windows opening, but things do get scary and then very scary.  This movie is very enjoyable.


Grave Encounters 2 is about as good a followup as Blues Brothers 2000 is to the original Blues Brothers.  The found footage from GE1 is a popular DVD and people love to argue whether or not it's true.  A team of film students decides to visit this shut down hospital to determine whether or not the film is real.

The first problem, here, is that these filmmakers are the most annoying shits to appear in front of a camera.  And this includes all the annoying shits on Youtube!  We watch them partying and drinking and playing grab-ass and making torture porn for over twenty minutes before they decide to go to this hospital.  It's thirty-five minutes before they enter the friggin' hospital!  And the movie is only 95 minutes long.

Most of the scares are basically rehashed scares from the first movie though, at the end, they decide to surprise us with some relatively big special effects that just fall flat.

The original movie was an enjoyable popcorn scare flick.  I strongly recommend.

The sequel was so bad that you'll root for the evil within the first hour.


Phil

I wanted to watch Grave Encounters when it came out on dvd but then I saw something on the box.  It claimed it was the most watched trailer on the internet and I thought, that's not good, what about how good the actual movie is?  As you say it's decent I think I'll check it out, as I should be able to get it pretty cheap now anyway.

I didn't even know they'd made a sequel.

Different people made the sequel.


Phil

I watched this one just the other day. I thought it was decent too, but I was amazed how slow it was to get going. If any of us wrote a script and posted it here, people would quit before they got to the good parts.

Btw, some of those effects are pretty easy to do in After Effects. Andrew Kramer has a tutorial too.

I liked the first 30 or so of Grave Encounters I, mainly because it was such a direct parody of Ghost Adventures on Travel channel.  Then, as it turned into more of a mindscrew than a haunted house flick, it got steadily less entertaining.  

Love the original.  Bad sequel.