I’m not sure what exactly attacks a group of curious film students about halfway through Grave Encounters 2¸ but it is big, loud, scary, and random—much like everything else in the movie.  The question of what this creature is still remains, however, secondary, to the why; as in, why are these kids in a mental asylum?

That question gets tossed around by the audience for the first little while, and then finally by the students-turned-prisoners as they realize the cover-up they are trying to document is far more realistic than they thought.

The enigmatic Vicious Brothers return one year later from their inaugural horror film, Grave Encounters, with a sequel that blurs the line between fiction and reality, while offering some pretty horrific moments and one giant, deformed….something or other. These college kids are mostly funny and entertaining, but a lengthy attempt to make their story more plausible and they themselves more likeable falls short in the beginning-as tends to be the case with most horror unfortunately.

The handsomely equipped fivesome (they have about a dozen cameras to set up in this massive abandoned institution to go with a bunch of handhelds) include the leader/director/horror movie lover who looks like a young Robert Pattinson, his girlfriend and scream queen who resembles a young Amy Adams, and his best friend, who like Val Kilmer – of any age really.

That is the extent to which you need to know who they are, because after all, they are loud and cocky college kids, trespassing where they shouldn’t belong, and this is a horror film.

While they are at times both funny and annoying (and boring) as students tend to be, the film gets a lot of credit for being clever and meta. The film exists in world between ours now and the one of the first Grave Encounters; that is to say, the original movie is also a movie in this film. Make sense?

So it’s a nice touch, as the kids (names don’t matter) slowly learn that that movie they saw was actually real, and now here we are watching them in a found footage movie that may or may not be real, and this idea can carry on ad infinitum for sequels and sequels.

The layering is way more fun than it sounds, and the film winks nicely at itself – trust me, Inception this is not (though there is a bit too much exposition).

Regardless, the scary moments are pretty scary, and the movie is filled with the weird and creepy, and definitely delivers with the Paranormal Activity­ style camera play; instead of just letting you scare yourself, it tries hard to scare you. So enjoy, and hopefully some kids somewhere out there will take the film seriously enough so that they look to seek out these haunted asylum, and make a movie of their own. Or maybe they already have…

[star v=3]

Gore Rating: