Gravedancers

Gravedancers

R4 DVD

Reel DVD

Gravedancers is a example of a film which shows lots of potential but is ultimately let down by the overuse of special effects and Hollywood gimmicks.

The film opens with a woman being killed by an unseen force, a bit like a scene from the film “the entity”, she is dragged, beaten and let hanging. This sets the stage for what begins to develop as an interesting ghost story.

Three college friends reunite to say goodbye to an old pal and after the funeral return to the graveyard to have a few drinks to have a private farewell. They are not the most likeable of characters, a heavy drinker/stone Sid, a yuppie lawyer (Harris) recently married and his ex girlfriend Kira who at one time was his stalker ! As they celebrate their friend’s life Sid finds a strange note with a poem called the Gravedancers lament. He reads the note aloud and they join in its message of live life to the full by dancing on some graves. After that everything changes.

What follows is, for quite a while, a solid ghost story. There are subtle signs of haunting, opening doors, knocks and sounds and an excellent edgy mood is created, this first section of the film seems to be marked by less is more, if only that cautious filmmaking continued ! The first appearance of the ghost to Harris and his wife is harrowing and well presented.

The storyline unfolds well - when Sid calls in paranormal investigators they find that the Gravedancers lament has more than once verse and while the one they read celebrated life, the next verse was a curse. It seems they have a fortnight to live and with each day the paranormal activity get worse. The haunting begins to increase in intensity until Kira is brutally attacked. The paranormal investigators in tow they return to the graveyard to discover the names of the graves they desecrated. They discover that they are haunted by three ghosts, the ones whose graves they danced on. A young pyromaniac who died young after setting a fire and killing his family and himself, a women who killed her lover and his wife with an axe and a judge who tortured, killed and sexually abused women in his basement. A motley crew to say the least, who’d realize that the graves you just happen to dance belong to such psychopaths !!

Sad to say as the intensity of the haunting progress the subtlety of the earlier segments of the film are overtaken with an orgy of special effects which are way over the top. While the ghost shown earlier is impressive, later we get very “Hollywood” looking ghosts which do not scare or frighten at all but just look rather silly. As the plot progresses we get to the stage when a fence (!) wraps itself around the house and the special effects reach fever pitch and all level of common sense goes out the window. The climax when a large face comes out in a blue cloud and a giant hand tries to take Harris back to the grave are more comic book than ghost story.

This is a film which showed an immense amount of promise, it has an interesting plot which was different to many other ghost stories, the gravedancers lament was a very nice twist and the interactions between the main characters added to the texture of the story. However, the overuse of special effects and the need to go way over the top in the final half an hour destroyed most of the suspense built up earlier in the film. Gravedancers is fun to watch, but really is a movie which showed great promise and lost its way.