This is a found footage spoof of paranormal reality shows like "Ghost Hunters" and it works very well. The story centers around the "Grave Encounters" crew who investigate a deserted and supposedly haunted mental hospital.

What works so well here is the setup. Most of the crew, particularly hot shot host Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), are painted as manipulators of their audience. They scoff their way through interviews with people familiar with the seriously demented history of the hospital. Lance even goes so far as to pay someone whose never seen anything odd occur at the hospital to make up a story on camera.

With that basic level of distrust and dislike established, the "Grave Encounters" team is locked overnight in the hospital. According to Lance, locking themselves inside brings and additional sense of danger to the show's realism.

As is to be expected, strange things, followed by bad things, followed by horrible things begin occurring. Hallways change and exit doors lead to more hallways and tunnels. The hospital is changing. It becomes a maze. Hours turn to days and the crew is slowly killed off by evil spirits and malevolent ghosts. But as the hauntings grow, we start to like the remaining crew members, even the despicable Lance Preston. And it's too bad that all of them are being driven insane as they are relentlessly pursued. It's weird but I was most affected by a moment when a clearly crazed and starving Lance kills and eats a rat.

The special effects are average at best but are used well and the normally cheap and overused jump scare is actually well utilized.

Okay well, after watching many of these films with the typical hand-held camera style I can be confident in saying that this is probably one of, if not the worst I have seen. Firstly it's a stereotypical setting held within a mental asylum, although very typical it can be a great plot line in some cases unfortunately in this it was not. The movie was cram packed full of highly suspenseful scenes which at the climax of the build up ended with showing the viewer absolutely nothing, and somehow after the 'nothing' that happened everyone seems to run away screaming like they saw the ghost of Vincent price himself. These films are so overplayed and have been turned into something more of comedy rather than fear. A window opens here and a door slams there, it has been done before. There ate never ending scenes of sleeping, screaming, crying and loud noises and shaky camera work. [spoiler]This is probably the worst bit , all of a sudden the door of which they entered the asylum is now a meaningless entry door to yet ANOTHER endless abandoned hallway, so now the whole asylum is a labyrinth, soon after this everyone begins to go insane slowly but surely. And to top of this wonderful film when the frontman is the only person inevitably left he kills a rat with a metal pole and eats it in front of the camera, soon after the gracious scene, the most feared people from the asylums past, the doctors who performed the lobotomies on the patients all of a sudden show up and lobotomise our very brave and cocky frontman , THE END![/spoiler]

Okay so, in a nutshell do not bother with this Whatsoever it's a waste of time and quite frankly both me and my friend feel like ringing our box office provider and complaining that not only we would like our money back but as well as that why this atrocity is even featured on their box office.

With what little I knew about _Grave Encounters_, I knew it had ticked enough of my "Generally Avoid" boxes that I never really had any interest in watching it. In fact the only reason I saw it at all was because of a recommendation I got online when I posed the question "Where there any good movies in 2011"?

I didn't love _Grave Encounters_. But I am, to my surprise, super glad that I watched it. If more Found Footage Horror films were like this one, maybe I wouldn't detest the genre. Seriously, although I had a number of problems with the movie, I'd still put this one up closer to _The Last Exorcism_ and _The Blair Witch Project_ than to the usual dreck the genre offers.

_Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._