Movie Review: Open Grave

My pillow was calling my name and my eyes were so tired after watching the disappointing You’re Next. However, my brain was asking for something more, something that made the evening more eventful than it had been. The last time I had watched two new movies in one night was when I watched Alien (terrible) and Sharknado (terribly…hilarious!!!) and I thought maybe the same thing could happen here if I were to watch a second one. The movie that popped into my head: Open Grave. An indie film, Open Grave’s trailer looked interesting. It left me wondering what had just happened, but similar to You’re Next, got me curious. It looked like a chaotic mess for sure, but I’ve seen movies portray themselves as such but come together quite nicely.

Open Grave…is not one of these films. It’s a chaotic mess at the beginning and it’s still a chaotic mess at the end. The director’s name (Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego) is more complex than this script is. You can’t even get a plot summary of the film on Wikipedia, which is probably because there is none. Sharlto Copley plays John, a man who wakes up in a mass grave and doesn’t have any idea who he is or how he got here. He’s helped out by a mute Asian girl who quickly runs away and then John finds a house with a bunch of people who are all in the same predicament: they have no idea what’s going on. Conveniently, neither does the audience, but most of us aren’t bored yet because the movie just started after all, right? There’s plenty of time for improvement.

So eventually everyone remembers their name, and one guy named Nathan discovers he knows a bunch of different languages but not the language that the mute Asian girl is writing everything in because once again, convenience calls in this situation. So the group walks around and finds a bunch of dead people tied to trees with barbed wire and a bunch of other fun stuff that’s really not all that important at all, just creepy stuff to keep us interested.

Eventually they find some abandoned buildings but none of it really makes sense. At this point, I’m getting a little impatient. When is something relevant going to happen? One of them dies, and then nothing happens again….FOREVER. This movie doesn’t know north from south or which way it wants to go with its story. Nothing they do leads to anything at all. Who are the characters? After about five eternities we find out their occupation but that’s all! These characters are hollow and don’t have a clue what’s going on just like the audience doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Sharlto Copley has shown me he has talent in District 9 and Elysium so why he would agree to star in this I don’t know.

Memories slowly start to come back to some of the party but once again, not really anything substantial. Just a bunch of stuff that really doesn’t pertain to anything, just more fluff.

They try to bring emotions into it towards the end but it’s like “Really? You guys haven’t known what’s been going on this whole film and now you’re going to start judging each other and turning on the waterworks? Are you kidding me?”

Once again, if you’re new to my blog,  I’ve always ranked movies on a scale of 0-100 (I don’t know why, I just always have). Here’s the grading scale.

 90-100  It’s a great movie and definitely one worth buying. (Scrooge, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Green Mile, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)

80-89   It was a pretty good movie and definitely one worth seeing, but it doesn’t quite scratch my top ten percentile. (Poseidon, Iron Man, Lone Survivor, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Next Three Days)

70-79   It’s okay but I’ve seen better. It has its moments, but it has its flaws, too. (The Usual Suspects, 21 Jump Street, Escape Plan, Captain America: The First Avenger, Dawn of the Dead)

60-69   It’s got plenty wrong with it but I still got enjoyment out of this one. (Pacific Rim, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Disaster Movie)

50-59   This movie isn’t intolerable but it’s not blowing my mind either. I’m trying really hard to get some sort of enjoyment out of this. (Aliens, Alien Resurrection, Full Metal Jacket, Thor, You’re Next)

40-49   This movie is just mediocre. It’s not doing anything other than the bare minimal, so morbidly boring that sometimes I’m actually angry I watched this. (Patriot Games, The Great Gatsby, Pitch Black, Alien, Serendipity)

30-39   Definitely worse than mediocre, the 30’s ironically define the 1930’s, full of depression, lack of accomplishments, poverty and just so dumb. (The Contract, Pride and Prejudice, Redemption)

20-29   What did I just watch? Cliches, stupidity, nothingness, did I mention stupidity? Just…wow. (The Sum of All Fears, Thor: The Dark World)

0-19      Watching this movie resulted in one or more of the following: seizure, loss of brain cells, falling asleep/unconsciousness, feel you wasted your time/day, accomplished nothing for you, left the movie knowing less about it then you did going into it, constantly asking yourself why you came to see this movie, or near-death experience. In short, staring at a wall was just as entertaining as watching this movie. This movie deserved a sticker or a label that said, “WARNING: EXTREME AMOUNT OF SUCKAGE.” (Midnight Cowboy, Dark Fury, Alien 3)

My score for Open Grave: 10.

This movie is like a giant unopened Christmas present and you unwrap all the paper and scramble through all the unnecessary tissue paper looking for your present and after looking through it for five minutes you come to the realization that there is no present. Open Grave is dreadful, atrocious, deplorable and every other synonym for terrible you can find. No one involved with this visual representation knows what is going on and the fact that this is even categorized as a movie disgusts me. I know some YouTube filmmakers who make better movies than this. This movie needs to be buried because no one wants to see this (see what I did there?). It is a huge waste of time and if you know what’s good for your well-being, you won’t see it.

*SPOILER ALERT* IF YOU DON’T WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED, STOP READING!!!

*SPOILER’S EDITION*

They eventually, after watching what feels like three hours of your life slow-walk away, reveal that these people are a group of scientists looking for a cure to a disease. John’s the lead scientist and his “cure” knocks the subject out and causes them to lose their memory so it still needs some tinkering. The whole film the group is trying to figure out why the 18th is circled on the calendar and it ends up the military is coming in on the 18th and they’re going to kill everyone, no survivors. So everyone gets killed, not that I could care less or anything like that, except for John and his significant other. I honestly don’t care enough to look at the cast list to find out her name and neither should anyone else so moving on. John and what’s-her-face jump into the mass grave and inject themselves with this memory-loss stuff and John wakes up again after an unknown amount of time and once again, doesn’t know what’s going on, meaning the whole process starts all over again. It’s like the director tried to make the movie come full circle, except that the movie never left the starting point.