Publication Date: 08-09-2025

Grave Encounters 2 (2012) review

Dir. John Poliquin

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

The original Grave Encounters was something of a surprise for the horror genre. Considering the dreck the found-footage division of horror was treated with recently, watching it wasn’t a totally mind-blowing experience, but a fulfilling and nourishing one, employing cautiously used technology with an effective story to make a pretty entertaining film. So entertaining, they couldn’t leave the film alone and had to make a sequel, adding to the line of good of movies with an inferior, drab sequel attached to it.

Grave Encounters 2 is a seriously confused muddle of a movie. Its tone is never established, its scares are perfunctory and uninspired, and it exists obviously as a cash-cow for a surprisingly successful low-budget horror flick. The first issue is it makes the almost never reliable decision to treat its predecessor as a movie (similar to films like The Blair Witch Project and The Human Centipede did). This throws a fork in its continuity of the original film, and already stretches the bounds of plausibility, as if no demons or paranormal activity ever took place.

This time we focus on Adam (Richard Harmon), a college-kid away at film school, shooting movie reviews on YouTube to “get his name out there” and currently filming his own horror film. His best friend is Trevor (Dylan Playfair) serves as one of his co-stars and his assistant who enjoys getting higher than a kite at parties and when he’s in his dorm room. Adam reviews a film called Grave Encounters on his YouTube page, and soon starts receiving strange messages from an account called “DeathAwaits” (the words of the graffiti sprayed on the doors of the psychiatric hospital in the first film). He becomes obsessed by the messages and even receives strange notes from the film’s producer, Jerry Harland, who he secretly interviews in an attempt to get behind the reality that the movie could be housing.

The interviews Adam conducts take up most of the first forty-minutes. After that, Adam, Trevor, and his filmmaking pals decide to venture out to the psychiatric hospital, named “Collingwood,” where the first film was shot to shoot a documentary on the possible legitimacy of the original Grave Encounters movie.

I was taken by how much I enjoyed the film’s first half; it was breezy, intriguing, if sometimes tedious with the amount of partying, and set the stage for a perfect direction the film could’ve easily managed. However, all potential to further this interesting premise with thoughts and cleverness was obliterated during the late second and third act when the film’s true intentions come through. It becomes clear that the film isn’t so much concerned with the intelligence of staging interviews and uncovering clues with the original cast/crew, but trying to remake the contents of its predecessor with foreseeable found footage clichés. When seeing the first film, it was pretty surprising and unexpected to see exits almost completely disappear, hallways of a building getting rearranged and manipulated with, and the entire hospital to seemingly take on a life of its own. It gave off true feeling of abandonment, disorientation, confusion, and lostness. Seeing all of this done again is a muchness; a complete rehash of once mildly-original ideas brought into a solid film.

One of the many tones the film erects is the kind of meta, self-referential personality horror films have assumed over the years. This is when a film nudges the audience in a winking-sort of way, makes its characters trickier and more alert by giving them a better heads up on clichés of the horror genre (even though the audience knows they might as well be lambs to slaughter), and feels like a “how many times can we remind the audience we setting up something ‘new?'” ordeal. This constantly self-aware persona the picture adopts not only adds to the tedium, but further insults the audience by having to continuously remind us that the original Grave Encounters is in fact real and the guerrilla filmmakers behind this new one here are militant and devout in their beliefs to prove it to us. Have mercy.

The last act is when the film really takes a turn for the worst. We get grossly underlit footage of the hospital, when we saw it lit well for the most part in the original film, almost copycat shots from it as well, and redundant sequences involving demons hellbent on attacking. Several jump scares, videographic glitches, and obnoxiously loud sequences evoking danger and fright, it becomes almost boringly shallow and uninteresting.

Grave Encounters 2 defines a cinematic “been there, done that.” It sets itself up as being full of opportunities and conversational details, but quickly discards it for redundant drivel, exercising its right to be cliche and expected. The only thing it leaves as conversational is how it will approach a second sequel; how much more meta can we make this kind of material? It’d be amusing to see two friends giving a commentary on the first or second film, voicing their criticisms in a delightfully nostalgic, Mystery Science Theater-kind of way for the impending third film. After all, I think this is the kind of practice and recommended viewing experience Grave Encounters 2 encourages.

My review of Grave Encounters

Starring: Richard Harmon, Dylan Playfair, and Leanne Lapp. Directed by: John Poliquin.