Maiko (Kaitlyn Leeb, Isabelle Beech as a child) is an American studying in Japan. She has disturbing dreams about a woman searching for her daughter, calling out for her. This may be because she's beginning a quest to find her birth mother (Maiko Miyauchi).
Joining her in her search is a student video team that will document her journey – producer Amber (Cassie Thomson), cameraman Kyle (Graham Wardle), and sound man Terry (Dejan Loyola).
The group is given a warning about the Yure ("YOU-ray," the restless souls of the suicide victims ) by a wanderer named Jin (Hiro Kanagawa), who knows the forest well and agrees to help them find where Maiko's mother committed suicide.
Takeaway lesson: Do not ... Repeat, DO NOT ... enter the Suicide Forest under any circumstances.
This is a SyFy Channel movie that has all the scary elements of a Japanese "obake" (ghost) story. The acting and story are okay, and actually, compared to other SyFy movies I've seen, Grave Halloween is not bad. But, the problem with SyFy movies is that they are so predictable. That's this one's problem, and this time, there's no familiar veteran actor/actress to "legitimize" the movie.
The movie has only a slight relevance to Halloween, but SyFy Channel exploited that to make the movie part of their "31 Days of Halloween" observance. Pretty tacky, huh?
