Customer Reviews

Open Graves

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Open Graves is slightly better than most straight-to-video horror flicks, though by no means a standout movie. This was the directorial debut of Álvaro de Armiñán, and to his credit, the director does a solid job. He serves up good cinematography, and quality lighting. The film was shot in Spain, which makes for a beautiful and exotic backdrop for the story.

The plot obviously borrows ideas from Jumanji and Final Destination, though the execution of the concept is original. The first death in the movie is certainly more hardcore than what the Final Destination series offers up. My bigger complaints with the movie was that CGI effects were overused, and none of the acting performances stand out. I was also disappointed by the manner in which the Mamba game must be concluded (with a question), as the writer ripped the idea off from the speaking doors in Labyrinth.

I mostly watched this movie because of the ridiculously sexy Eliza Dushku, and coupled with the game design, it made for a decent horror movie. My opinion: Give this one a rent from Redbox before you decide on buying the DVD.

Open Graves (Alvaro de Aminan, 2009)

I think I saw this movie a couple of years ago, except back then it was directed by Joe Knee, it was called Ghost Game, and it was at least kind of watchable, in that horrific, can't-tear-your-eyes-away kind of way. Here, we have the stunning Eliza Dushku, who after a series of small but interesting roles really kicked her career off in 2000's Bring It On, and has made really, really bad movie choices ever since, from the execrable Soul Survivors to this particular piece of silliness, which combines the aforementioned Ghost Game with Final Destination (kind of) with a dash of Hellraiser to come up with something that manages to be both entirely unoriginal and entirely unscary. Kind of odd for a guy who's been assistant director and/or second unit director to such lights as Pedro Almodovar (Live Flesh, All About My Mother), Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto), and Cesar Martinez Harrada (Everything in Place).

So anyway, plot: stoners/slackers on vacation (Cloverfield's Mike Vogel and stuntman Boris Martinez in his first acting role--neither of whom were scripted nearly as white as they are, judging by the way they make fun of Dushku's being white early in the film), along with a pouty model (Lindsay Caroline Robba, also in her first acting role) Pablo is shooting for a calendar and an enigmatic bathing beauty (Dushku) who comes along for, well, no apparent reason, pick up an old (as in Inquisition-era) game called Open Graves in a small market in Spain. It's rainy that night, so they decide to play with some other friends. They soon discover that every time the game is played, one of the players who drew a particular type of card loses his or her life in some really odd way. (Think of it as Monopoly's Chance cards, only with fortune-cookie sayings that are somehow in English, despite the game having, you know, never been out of Spain.) I'm sure you know the rest. Solve the mystery before Final Girl (obvious who that is, no?) gets chomped by the curse, or whatever. There's an even sillier subplot with an obsessed police detective (Gary Paquer), but I won't go into that here.

I'm not sure how many ways I can say the word "dumb" without a handy thesaurus, so I'll just say this movie is dumb, dumb, dumb. As usual, Dushku is way too good an actress for the role, and you can see her trying to break out of it, but without success. (Until the last fifteen minutes, when her part becomes so unintentionally hilarious that even Meryl Streep couldn't have saved it, that is.) Vogel plays the same kind of cocky-yet-affable guy he did in Cloverfield, so no big stretch there, but he's a likable enough actor. Other than the two of them, however, there is not reason one for you to watch this movie. Oh, and did I mention that it's dumb? * ½

With "Open Graves" it is time for another thrilling episode of movie calculus. For this 2009 horror flick take "Jumanji" and add it to "Final Destination," then add a splash of your pick of the "The Blind Dead" movies, subtract "The Monkey's Paw" (a classic short story in the horror genre that apparently nobody in this movie has ever heard of), and throw in a hint of a Bill Murray movie that will give away the punch line. Then, for good measure, go watch your favorite Eliza Dushku horror movie or an episode from one of her television series, all of which are way better than this film. We begin with a nice little flashback to the Spanish Inquisition, when a witch was condemned to a torturous death and then had her skin and bones used to create an ornately carved board game. The Egyptian board game Senet dates back to 3500 BC, so it is not farfetched that the Inquisition would come up with a sick and twisted board game, just that it is a sick and twisted pro-type for Monopoly, which does not pop up in the real world until 1930. Cut from dark dungeon of the 15th century to the present day in Northern Spain on a sunny beach where surfer girl Erica (Dushku), meets up with Jason (Mike Vogel), who buys a board game called Mamba from a creepy storekeeper. That night Erica, Jason, and his idiot friends, all of who are obviously fated to die before our two leads are left to try and stay alive until the final credits, get drunk and play the game. It turns out that when you play the game whoever wins gets their heart's desire, and everybody else will, well, you know....

To be specific: every time you land on certain squares on the board you pick up a game card, each of which has a cryptic rhyming couplet that tells you how you are going to die. The game ends, people start dying, and damn if they do not start dying in the way predicted by their card. Who saw that coming? If this is not bad enough, the world weary Detective Izar (Gary Piquer) shows up and starts asking quesitons. Seems somebody was recently skinned alive, which we all recognize as being what happened to Mamba Masamba, the witch from the film's prelude, but of whom the detective knows nothing. But he is interested in the game, which is not a complication Erica and Jason need in their quest to stay alive. Basically at this point you will have a series of gruesome deaths (lots of attacks by lots of animals, involving a sort of plagues of Egypt vibe, which is in keeping with the Old Testament level of vengeance favored by the Inquisition), of varying degrees of interest and grossness, until Erica and Jason try to play out the end game.

There is never a point in "Open Graves" (a title, by the way, that really tells you nothing about the plot or action of the movie), where you care about the survival of anybody else besides Erica; any similar feelings for Jason will be squashed well before the end. I suppose if you do not care about all the handsome young things dying, then you can better enjoying watching them die horribly, but that pretty much defeats the whole idea of being horrified by a horror movie. Of course, Dushku's character has a clue sooner than the rest of the menu in this movie, but it takes a while for the others to catch up, and then it is, of course, too late, so on and so forth. This is the first director credit for Álvaro de Armiñán after twenty-one films as a second unit director or assistant director and he appears to be hampered by the special effects in this low-budget film in terms of coming up with any memorable sequences after the grizzly opening ( I kept dozing off and had to do picture-go-back to see what I had missed, which was never worth the effort). As for the writing, the screenplay is by Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor, television writers who graduated to the big screen with "The Brave One," which makes me think that this was something they had on the shelf, because this is certainly not a step forward. My final comment would be that if you want to see Eliza Dushku, go on line and find photos of her to look at, because there is not enough of that in this movie to justify rounding up either. At least she got a trip to Spain out of this one.

Open Graves' premise had promise. A bunch of surfers stumble across a cursed board game known as Mamba. The game's board and pieces were made from the skin and body of a witch named Mamba Mosamba who was executed for witchcraft during the Spanish Inquisition. If you die in the game, you die in real life. It's like Jack Chick's Blackleaf all over again!

Unfortunately, Open Graves is torn between being a hip by-the-numbers teen horror flick reminiscent of Final Destination and being an original movie about a board game. The collective pretty people playing the game are preposterous stereotypes. Not one of them is likable. The worst is the beautiful but acting-impaired Eliza Dushku as Erica, who makes googly eyes at hero Jason (Mike Vogel) over the board game. The poor girl does her best trying to make board gaming look sexy, but after a certain point she's just looks ridiculous.

Since whoever wins the game gets their wish, and it's pretty much a guarantee that if you play SOMEBODY has to win, the simple solution is to wish you never played the game, right? Fortunately Jason figures this out. Unfortunately it means everyone has to die before he can get to that point. Open Graves acts as if this is a huge revelation. It's not.

Open Graves' concept is interesting but director Alvaro de Arminan simply can't deliver. A side plot involving a cop who wants the game for himself falls apart at the end. Each death is intercut with stultifyingly bad poetry, as if that's supposed to increase the horror of a man getting his eye cut out by a crab. Without a villain, movies about curses need to work hard to give the victims (and the audience) hope that they can somehow outwit the curse - Final Destination always dangled the possibility that the victim would escape his fate. There's no way to avoid dying in Open Graves - it's a death march for a bunch of attractive idiots playing a game they don't like. Not even the actors seem convinced.

The ending tries to be edgy. Mosamba's appearance is the most interesting part of the film, and the special effects are competent enough. But that doesn't make up for the rest of the mess.

Yes, for the 100th time, this really is Jumanji meets Final Destination plus a bit of The Ring/Ringu, Evil Dead, Labyrinth, and Triangle/Time Crimes thrown in for good measure. It was such a brilliant concept that I actually sought out this movie to watch. Sadly I found out that you really have to work hard to turn an idea like "grown-up Jumanji" into something that is forgetable.

Jumaji Part:
The game was created by a witch with her blood and tears (literally) and it becomes the Necronomicon of the board game world. This is one of the first things that goes wrong. We know too much about the board game. This is perhaps the one idea that wasn't stolen from Jumanji that would have worked even better here. There's no mystery to the thing at all except that after the massive amounts of information found during the obligatory mid-movie internet search you are wondering, "Why didn't the characters do this in the first place?" At any rate you never really get a clear shot of what appeared to be one of the coolest looking set-pieces ever. Which was just a slap in the face to the many hours it must've taken someone to create the wretched thing. The name of the game escapes me, mainly because the name just randomly appears out of thin air after one of the charactes blurts it out, Mamba something or other and it's only said a couple/three times. I figured if the characters didn't care about the name of their death sentence I shouldn't either. Shoot I still don't know why Dragonflies were always used as some sort of omen. Yes I know in England they are associated with bad luck/evil but that's because I know a little about English superstitions and dragonflies it certainly wasn't brought out in the movie. Shoot, if I would have been Japanese I would have thought that the Dragonfly was a good sign. That's not important though because while playing there are free spaces and spaces that make you draw a Jumanji card like thing, replete with Tarot card imagery and Jumanji-like riddles and poems, which were well written and poorly read. Those who draw a card die like the riddle on the card states of course. So there you have it. The twist being that when/if you reach the end instead of calling out Jumanji you get to solve another last-minute-addition-to-the-script-riddle, shove your token into a snake's mouth and hope it rolls out at which point you get a single wish. (Otherwise you are skinned... alive.) The real final caveat -thank God- is that like the VHS tape of the Ring you have to pass it on to some poor sap to get your wish. Which is funny since evil can't just upgrade to a video game or DVD/Blu-Ray combo, maybe that's on purpose since you'd be hard pressed to find someone willing to watch a VHS Cassette or take time to play a board game, but I digress. None of that is a spoiler believe it or not. Truth be told there isn't much focus on the game except as an afterthought or to push the movie forward. Unlike say Jumanji the game isn't the star here. Most of this movie's time is spent in Final Destination mode.

Final Destination:
Yep, most all of them die in some pretty unimaginative ways. Unlike Final Destination (first and second) there never really is any suspense or expectation built up. You know who, in what order and pretty much the manner in which each character will die just by watching the first game play session. The riddles on the cards were better thought out I think. While there were two deaths that stuck out to me; as they both are the most Final Destination like; I got the sense that the writer/director had kind of lost their way in where the movie was supposed to go. I mean, the deaths weren't the closest things ever to the cards drawn which was probably done to bring some kind of surprise to the actual event. I don't know. Pretty standard stuff really. For the record there is only one open grave in the whole movie, so grammatically the plural in the title is incorrect.

With all of that out of the way there are a few good scenes in the movie, especially towards the end when the big reveal comes. That would be the major spoiler so I can't say, but after an almost lucid moment when at last we kind of feel like something really happened we get thrown into Triangle/Time Crimes and it all starts over. No, that isn't a spoiler. Just reading this review or others you will more than likely have already instinctively deduced what wish would be chosen. However these few good scenes are mixed in with lots of filler that didn't need to be there. The special effects are OK and while not the best ever were passable. The concept was excellent. The actors/actresses were ok simply because they are fodder for the somewhat ambiguous game which is nameless here evermore.

My vote... pass. :(

In this Spanish-American horror film, unsuspecting young surfers and their friends play the board game on a whim. Following the instructions of the game, the seven players roll dice one after another and draw cards, on which they find some enigmatic verses. Actually, the old board game "Mamba" was made during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and it has strange powers these players will know when one of them is found dead exactly the way the card predicted.

Two names will pop up in our mind immediately - "Final Destination" and "Jumanji." Unfortunately the deaths of "Open Graves" are less shocking than in the former, and its CGI effects are much worse than the latter. Each set-piece is decent, but predictable, and some scenes feel drawn-out. The film contains some gruesome materials, but is never really scary.

Perhaps, like me, you are interested in the film because of the two names: Mike Vogel and Eliza Dushku. Mike Vogel plays an American student visiting Spain (the story is set in Spain) and Eliza Dushku is Erica, a mysterious beauty living in a lighthouse. Their acting is not bad, I think. Because of the film's thin story, however, the two actors don't have much to do - and what their characters should do is pretty obvious from the very beginning of the game.

The film has two subplots about a veteran detective of the local police and a man in a wheelchair, but first-time feature director Álvaro de Armiñán fail to use their back stories (both related to the game) effectively, missing chances to heighten what little mystery or suspense there was in the main story. The ending (which I don't reveal here) is, I admit, something not many people would expect, sort of refreshing, but still it can be better with more developed characters and some additional ideas.

Being an Eliza Dushku fan, I find the film passable viewing (hence my rating), but I believe some will be disappointed with the film and its dearth of suspense or scares.

Ok I grant you this is not a high budget special effects gore film.But it is a new way of looking at some old ideas and you don't predict everything thats going to happen ahead of time.While I thought one of the charectors was a bit cheese ball, I thought the rest kept the story flowing well.I was very glad to sit through somthing that I had to watch to know what was going on instead of being able to predict each move ahead of time,and that instead of just gore and sudden volume increases triing to catch you of guard,I enjoyed a story.

****Spoilers in review****

As another reviewer said it borrows heavily from Jumanji & Final Destination. It really lacks the pacing & drama of Final Destination though. I found myself bored about 1/2 way through. I never really cared about the characters. I don't think they were developed well enough or something. Then we get to the riddle made famous in Labyrinth. My brother then quoted what the guy should've wished for & he did minus the never to happen again part hence we end up in a Star Trek "loop". Once you've seen enough of this stuff this just falls flat & if you haven't seen the other things mentions, go watch them instead. I watched it mostly cause I like Eliza Dushku & she wasn't really a big enough part to save it although the "end" scene with her was kind of hot.

Worth a rental at best but I'd say skip it.

Yeah, this isn't an academy award nominee, but it was way better than the people bashing it say it is. The gore was minimal, but was fairly well done. Yeah, I gave it a star For Eliza, but the other 4 are deserving of the movie. The acting was pretty solid. I fail to see where people get "bad acting" at. Maybe, I watched the movie sober. That could be where the difference comes from. Watch "Pray for Hell" if you want horrible acting or "Zombiez." These movies are truly garbage. .

There is some creativity in this low budget thriller but its execution isn't very special. Four fun-loving surfers stumble upon a mysterious game called MAMBA. While playing, they each draw cards with enigmatic messages which we know are deadly foreshadowings. If the film's pacing had been sharper it might have been better. But the slow pace and a substory involving a strange detective only manage to drag the movie down. Performances are what you'd expect.