Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Mike Vogel, Eliza Dushku, Ethan Rains, Lindsay Caroline Robba | Written by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor
UK Certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 84 minutes | Directed by Alvaro de Arminan
Open Graves takes two credible name actors and plunks them right in the middle of a film that they are both way above. Imagine if you will a square room where the walls have been replaced with four towering sides of a bad script and they are closing in on Mike “Cloverfield” Vogel and Eliza Dushku.
The film is basically a combination of Jumanji and the Final Destination series. It's about a group of surfer tourists in northern Spain who come across a mysterious board game from the age of the Spanish Inquisition. It's a rather creepy looking thing, but it's just a board game, right? Yeah, constructed all those years ago from the blood and flesh of a witch. As you might expect, playing the game leads to rather bad happenings. Or rather, death. There can only be one winner of the game, and each loser is given a card that cryptically describes how they are going to die.
I liked the plot, but that's about it. I thought it was interesting to have a seemingly harmless board game result in a variety of extremely gruesome deaths, where the supernatural power it harbours essentially controls fate and has it chase after the victims. As I mentioned, it's quite like Final Destination and a very kid-unfriendly, bastardised version of Jumanji, but all the fun is taken out of it and any chance of quality is diminished. Vogel and Dushku do their very best to carry the entire movie on their shoulders, but even their decent performances are grossly outweighed by the stupidity of the characters, the idiocy of the script, and simply horrible CGI. There's a scene involving killer snakes that plays a pivotal role in a character's future, but they look so damn ridiculous that every single ounce of potential drama that the scene has is completely removed.
As is commonplace with these kinds of movies, there's a twist. Another thing that's common is that you can usually see the twist from a mile off. That's exactly the case with Open Graves. When you can not only smell a twist, but also know exactly how it'll go down, you actually find yourself hoping that there won't be one. How about a simplistic happy ending? “Twists” these days really aren't twists at all, for the most part, and mainly because they're bloody recycled from film to film. Another gripe is that the writers often think the conclusions are way more intelligent than they actually are. Again, this is the case with this film.
Open Graves begins rather instantaneously with a short Saw-esque, super-flashy flashback that hints at the history of the vicious board game, and it ends in a similar nature, and very abruptly. You actually don't expect the film to begin so suddenly, let alone end the same way.
To end this review I don't have a twist to offer, but I hope you saw this coming: don't waste your time with this movie. Even the most generous critics would have a hard time salvaging these 84 minutes ridden with piss-poor visual effects for anything good other than the performances from the two leads.
EXTRAS ★ Just the trailer.