DVD Review: The Graveyard

The Graveyard. It’s hard to imagine that after all these years of horror movies that that simplistic title has eluded many a producer. Now, it finally sees the cover of a DVD and unfortunately for all of us, it should have stayed elusive. What starts out as a run of the mill “revenge” movie, The Graveyard quickly takes a path that not many films take…that of a run of the mill “revenge” movie. There is nothing new here to make it worth anyone’s while.
The plot of this film goes something like this: A group of teens are spending the summer at a campground. They head to the nearby cemetery to play a game called “Run for Your Life”. It’s basically Hide and Go Seek. The poor bastard that has to do the seeking is the unknowing pawn in a bad prank and yeah, he ends up dead. Five years later, the one kid that actually had to do time for the death is being released from prison, and the rest of the gang wants to help him come to terms with everything that’s happened. They do the kindly thing and take him back to the campground where everything happened! Besides everybody being on edge, everything is hunky-dory. Then people start to die.
The DVD’s video is clean and pretty crisp. Lionsgate is the distributor and they rarely put out a crappy looking disc. The director tried his honest best with what he had to work with, which was not much. It’s hard to believe that these were the best actors in the auditions, not to mention that the script was a piece of crap. Let me ask you, if there’s a homicidal maniac running around killing all your friends, would you stop to sit on a log and make out with the camp cook? These scenes have no place in horror movies. Nobody cares about romance after the killings have started---it makes no sense! Not to mention that the nighttime forest is lit up like an airport runway, but strangely, there are no lights. Surely we’re not to think that the quarter-moon they keep showing is shedding that type of luminosity?
The audio on the disc is nothing to write home about. It’s better heard through your TV’s speakers rather than your sound system. There is no surround available, so it’s not even worth turning it on, you’ll only get frustrated. Same goes for the extras on the disc. There’s no “making of” segment, no bloopers, no nothing. Just a few preview trailers. Easily one of the lamest horror discs recently released. It’s like a bad after-school special with a few scenes of gratuitous (and I do mean gratuitous—they must have paid the poor girl an extra ten bucks!) nude scenes.
If you’re looking for entertainment, The Graveyard is not it. Actually going to a graveyard at night, now that would produce more chills than watching this crapper.
It gets 1/2* out of *****.