Leofwine_draca Okay, OPEN GRAVES is poor. Surprisingly poor, considering the effort that has gone into this low budget production; although it's a US-financed movie it was shot in Spain with a Spanish director and supporting cast. And yet it turns out to be completely horrible, which is all thanks to a lacklustre storyline.A group of brain-dead surfers are the unlikeable protagonists in this film, among their number the minor horror star Eliza Dushku (WRONG TURN). They get mixed up in a dark world of voodoo and horror when they start playing a game which sees them dying for real. It's much like the 1990s film JUMANJI, where the board game came to life and took the kids on an adventure, except with a horror slant.Not that there's much in the way of horror here. This a murkily-shot production where swathes of boredom are interspersed with a few mildly gory supernatural death sequences. For some reason, the filmmakers are reliant on very poor CGI effects to keep the movie going, and it sinks the production further. OPEN GRAVES is a real stinker, that's for sure.

TheLittleSongbird I have seen far worse movies than Open Graves, but that is saying little in its favour. It does oddly enough have some redeeming values, some of the camera angles are not so bad and I'd say the same for Mike Vogel's performance. Also Eliza Dusku is very sexy. Unfortunately her sexiness is the only good thing about her performance, she is wasted with terrible dialogue and an uninteresting character and does nothing whatsoever to elevate. That is pretty much the same though with the rest of the cast, none of them seem to care or give any kind of heart into what they're doing. The script and characters does nothing in their favour in all fairness. The dialogue is cheesy and has no natural flow, and it is also far too talky. The characters are entirely uninteresting and annoying cardboard cutouts. Further disadvantaging the film are the crude-looking special effects, the dull and atmosphere-less story that we have seen many times before and much better, an atmosphere that has no suspense or horror and flat direction, that shows that almost nobody involved seemed to have their hearts in Open Graves. All in all, couldn't maintain my interest but there are a few things that save it from total disaster. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Paul Andrews Open Graves starts in Spain during 1485 as a Witch named Mamba is tortured, skinned alive & killed by the Spanish Inquisition. Jump forward to the 'Present Day' & Jason (Mike Vogel) is a surfer living in Spain, while looking around an old antiques shop a man in a wheelchair gives him an old wooden box containing a game to be played by seven people, later that night after a drinking party Jason & six of his buddies including potential girlfriend Erica (Eliza Dushku) decide to play the game which promises to grant the winner a wish of their choice. They play the game & as losers leave the game only Jason & Erica remain, Pablo (Boris Martinez) is later found dead on a beach & the friends become convinced that the game is killing the losers off as stated. Jason finds out that the evil board game was made with the Witches skin & bone & written in her blood, Jason & Erica have to finish the game & try to at least save themselves...This American & Spanish co-production was directed by Álvaro de Armiñán & feels like a silly horror film mix of Jumanji (1995), The Evil Dead (1981) & Final Destination (2000) with a little sprinkling of Wishmaster (1997) for good measure that felt to me like it was squarely aimed at a young teen audience. The script feels cobbled together from several much better films, the magical board game is straight out of Jumanji but has a slightly darker if sillier edge here, once the teens realise what's going on they try to stay alive in a Final Destination sort of way while the central concept of granting a wish & it backfiring in a painfully predictable way at the end reeks of Wishmaster while the ancient demons terrorising teens is surely lifted from The Evil Dead? The script for Open Graves is rather silly, from the way the teen act & behave to the silly death scenes to a seemingly random subplot about a cop wanting the game which is never resolved to it's predictable climax which you can see coming a mile off to a scene in which Erica emerges from the Ocean with wings. At only 80 odd minutes long Open Graves moves along at a decent pace but there's not much depth here at all, no-one is given any sort of background, the board game itself is just hard to take seriously which is a problem because Open Graves takes itself very seriously like it's some great supernatural horror film with deep underlying meanings but in reality it's bits & pieces of other much better films thrown together with little regard to narrative or logic or audience enjoyment.The kills in Open Graves are strange & bear no consistency, one for instance is very Final Destination in which a series of coincidences ends up in a woman's car crashing & setting on fire with her in it while there's a bizarre supernatural death in which a pretty young girl ages rapidly & then randomly deflates in hospital! The kills go between serious & downright idiotic like when a guy taking a pee on the edge of a cliff id startled by a lowly Dragonfly flying at him he falls off the cliff & killer Crab's claw away his flesh while he lies dying on the beach below. The tone & balance of Open graves, the kills, the character's the events & the story are all over the place like the makers couldn't decide what sort of film they were trying to make. The opening scene also features someone having their fingernails pulled out, there are a couple of gory skinned bodies seen, a Crab pokes out someone's eye, there's a bit of blood splatter & a man grows some new legs. Some of the CGI computer effects are poor, the CGI Snakes, the CGI transformation of Erica at the end, some CGI ghost's & a swarm of Dragonfly look pretty bad. Originally shot in 2006 this didn't get released until 2009 & premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US before hitting DVD.With a supposed budget of about $6,500,000 this had a lot of money spent on it & it's hard to see where it all went, while well made the CGI is poor at times & nothing stands out as being great. Actually filmed in Spain, not that it makes any difference since Open Graves could have been set anywhere for all the significance it has. The acting is average at best, no-one looks that interested & a few of the performances are just terrible.Open Graves is a silly teen horror film that tries to be totally serious but comes across as camp & silly at times, at least it's short & it's watchable enough I suppose but there are better films out there.

Boba_Fett1138 No Sir, I don't like it. This is one cheap, low-grade 'horror' thriller, that didn't even seem to had any good ideas of its own. It's a movie with a silly concept and silly concepts often equal silly bad movies. This movie is like a strange and bad mix of "Jumanji", "Hellraiser", "Final Destination" and whatever more. It doesn't use one good original idea and instead uses several from other movies and tried to combine it. Ineffectivly though. And perhaps this is the movie its biggest problem. The problem isn't necessarily the lack of originality but more the way it handles its concepts. Everything gets developed and executed quite poorly into the movie, which makes the overall movie a terrible ineffective one. It's just not a movie that ever gets tense, surprising or intriguing. There is basically no real reason why you should ever watch this movie, since it really doesn't have any redeeming qualities in it. No, it's hardly the worst thing you'll ever see but that doesn't mean you should watch it. You just can never get into this movie because of its lacking story and poor characters. It's a very distant movie, that tries to be mysterious but instead works out as lame and annoying. It involves some strange old board game, that causes those who play and loose it to die. Sounds good perhaps but the way it's being handled in this movie is far from interesting. We don't even get to know how the game works and what's exactly the point of the existence of such a game, what the rules are and how to win it, in the first place. The 'explaination' at the end doesn't really cover this and is just too out of tone with the rest of the movie that it feels totally wrong and bad. Bad as an horror, bad as a thriller, bad as a mystery. There are just no redeeming qualities in it. 4/10