SnoopyStyle At Yamanashi International University in Japan, Maiko is struggling with her mother's suicide two months earlier in the 'suicide forest'. Amber leads a class project with Kyle and Terry to look for her body. Ghostly apparitions start appearing in the background. They see two policemen carry out a body. Cameras are not allowed. Lone hiker Jin warns them and offers to guide them to the supposed site. Three classmates play a prank on them.It's strange to shot in BC with a bunch of white young adults and call it Japan. Kaitlyn Leeb is at most half-Asian. I'm sure they could have picked one Asian as part of the group. Some of them are definitely cannon fodder anyways. It's great to have a solid actor like Hiro Kanagawa but it's not enough. The ghosts don't count. There are way too many idiotic dudes acting idiotically. This is a no-budget horror that starts with minor creepiness and then turns into overblown horror shlock.

TheLittleSongbird For the SyFy Channel, who have produced countless bad movies with the odd tolerable one, Grave Halloween is not so bad at all. It is filmed and edited competently and the setting is quite creepy. The music does have the appropriate amount of eeriness, the death scenes are gory and really very chilling and the acting especially from Cassie Thomson and Hiro Kanagawa is above-average. Extra plaudits also for the details of Japan and the Japanese laws and customs being spot on, and for the homages paid to The Evil Dead, The Ring and The Blair Witch Project without blatantly ripping them off. Grave Halloween is not without its flaws though. The characters are not very well-defined at all and at the end of the day there's not really anybody despite the acting that you find yourself caring for. The dialogue lacks flow and can sound downright embarrassing at times("that's super comforting" is something you'd hear a stereotypical high school student say). And with the story, there is a good idea somewhere that is not translated quite so well on screen, the back-story and the Japanese culture are intriguing but the mystery and horror elements- which are more important- are not. The mystery elements are not paced very securely and feels too predictable and lacking in suspense and tension to really convince, and the horror suffers also from predictability and not everybody looking as though they properly care for their predicament. Grave Halloween wisely uses its special effects minimally, but when they are there at best they are just okay and too many times also rather shoddy. The ghosts evoke some chills, but did anybody else think that they looked a little more like zombies rather than ghosts? All in all for the SyFy Channel, Grave Halloween is not bad but as a movie taking that it's SyFy out of the equation for a minute it is one that is alright but left wanting. 5/10 Bethany Cox

GL84 Setting off into Aokigahara Forest, a teen and her friends' mission to put to rest her lingering fears of her mother's death put them into danger when the restless spirits of the dead around them take out their anger on the group for their attitudes toward them and must find a way of stopping them.This here turned out to be quite an entertaining and enjoyable effort that gets a lot of great points about it. One of the better elements here is the use of the local custom that plays such a central part of the storyline that it really starts to feel as though the events could happen to play out as they do. Being that this is Japanese the culture and heritage of honoring one's deceased echoes throughout this one in so many ways that the great pride it places on the subject earns the eventual rampage from the ghosts later on once the mocking had been committed. It's all completely justified and rational, and that makes the ghostly actions all the more fun with several incredibly chilling gags, from simply transporting you to a different dimensional plane of reality without realizing it in order to prevent their friends from finding them in time to prevent your death, vanishing behind trees, rocks or landscape changes to avoid detection, putting your own thoughts against you and making you do something against your will or just flat- out attacking you with their ghostly powers in vicious, brutal attacks. By doing this in such a chilling and creepy location, almost seemingly filmed at the real forest itself as the attention to minute features of the area makes for an absolutely chilling, creepy area to remain the entire time, and offers up plenty of suspense from the landscape itself. With a fast pace that keeps things moving along briskly, a couple of brutal and quite bloody deaths dished out, a real sense of danger when it comes to the treatment of the cast since they're all in the firing line at some point and not too many flaws here, this is a spectacular, stand-out effort.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Language.

antlionhunter Despite the title of this review sounding like a shot at this movie, I have to say this is a great film.I can't say going into this movie I had low expectations because I knew it was directed by Steven R. Monroe and I'll be the first to say I love his directing style. I really enjoyed his earlier works such as Sasquatch Mountain, Ogre, and Ice Twisters which I feel a lot of people looked down on based solely on the titles or some shoddy CGI.What Grave Halloween has in common with Steven R. Monroe movies is that it has a solid script, great character development, and some impressive cinematography (for the low budget).What separates Grave Halloween from Steven R. Monroe's earlier works is that you rarely notice you're watching a low-budget film when sitting through this movie. There is very little CGI in this film (there are some CGI flies near the end), but it's at least passable. The director took advantage of the budget by incorporating some very gruesome, even frighteningly realistic practical gore effects. Steven R. Monroe also makes great use of the setting of this movie, which appears to be filmed all in one location, by using incredible overhead shots of the forest and just beautiful cinematography of the area in general.Speaking of the setting, one of the reasons I was able to feel so immersed in this movie was because of how authentic it looked. I didn't check to see where this movie was filmed, but if it was filmed in America or some English speaking country then the director did an excellent job of hiding that. Of course, this is coming from a guy who doesn't speak a word of Korean (this movie takes place in Korea) so for all I know it could be in another eastern Asian country, but regardless it was a very believable setting for the story. The details such as the fact the car the characters took to get to the Suicide Forest had its steering wheel on the right side of the car did numbers to make this feel more like a story and less like a script if that makes sense.The tone of this movie is really chilling and works so well with the limited resources in both the budget and setting. I stated earlier that this movie has great cinematography and that's true, but this movie isn't just one big, beautiful string of cinematography either because that would take away from the tone. This movie is extremely atmospheric and has the perfect amount of lighting in both the day and night shots to create a consistently eerie vibe throughout.As the story progressed I felt more and more invested in the plot like I HAD to know what happened next. The first half of this movie is well- paced and exciting, but it's not until the second half that this film starts throwing some twists at you and really starts to pull you toward the edge of your seat.All that being said, I'll then go to say this: I think this is Steven R. Monroe's best Syfy Original Movie he's directed (but not necessarily his best all together). However, I will give one slight criticism, and that is that this movie didn't quite seem as complete as some of his others. Steven R. Monroe's films such as Sasquatch Mountain, Ogre, and Left in Darkness all did a phenomenal job in delivering closure to the story with a limited budget. Grave Halloween, while I did like its ending in a way, didn't feel as satisfying as some of Steven R. Monroe's other works. There seemed to be some loose ends that went untied when this movie was over.The ending is up to interpretation I suppose, and the small amount of disappointment had with the ending is no reason why you shouldn't check this B-Movie gem out for its solid entertainment and genuine creepiness throughout most of it.I highly recommend this movie for horror fans. I personally think it's a much more well-made movie than recent theatrical horror movies such as Insidious or Sinister, but see it for yourself.9/10