Greystone Park

This will sound harsh but "Greystone Park" (or "The Asylum Tapes" if you're outside the US) is comfortably among the worst movies I have ever seen.

No real plot, no thrills, no frights, no nothing.

Bad acting (I mean really, really bad), bad sound, bad camera work and even worse editing. I fully appreciate that the film is supposed to be a "found tapes" film - but that is no excuse to produce a 90+ minute film of which most of it you can't actually see what's going on. Adding loud bangs to the footage you can't see doesn't scare anybody above the age of four - not in the year 2012 anyway.

Sean Stone's father Oliver is a talented movie maker and one of the more important directors of the 20th century. This piece of garbage might be Stone Jr's first, last and only contribution to the annals of cinematic history.

As much as I dislike these shoddy shot movies with their questionable camera work and their supposedly "found footage" concept, then "Greystone Park" (aka "The Asylum Tapes") is definitely in the top five of the more boring and pointless movies in the genre that I have had the misfortune to stumble upon.

The story here, is as in so many other low budget movies, about a group of people venturing into a run-down, old, abandoned mental institution (or asylum, if you will) to investigate some alleged rumors about it being haunted.

Right, that is perhaps one of the most used and generic of story lines in the history of horror movies. And you'd think with so many movies with the same storyline that there would be a bigger chance for someone to actually get the recipe just right. You would, wouldn't you? Indeed, but "Greystone Park" swung and missed widely.

The movie is mostly just questionable camera work that was all over the place, and randomly interrupted by static noise to make the atmosphere seem all the more ghastly and scary. But it just didn't work. The movie came off as horribly rushed and forcefully pushed together in what seemed like an array of random clips.

I will say that the setting of the movie was actually what worked out the best for the movie. Although you'd think that a run-down and closed down mental institution would have its equipment and gear long looted and gone. But oddly enough, a lot of things were still there. Which just didn't really seem all that believable.

As for the acting, well people actually did good enough jobs with their given roles, although they were struggling hard having no proper storyline to work with.

If you enjoy these types of movies, perhaps you can find something enjoyable here, as I failed to. If you, like me, want to be properly entertained by a movie with proper camera work, then you are better off looking elsewhere.

Greystone Park has to be one of the least engaging films I've ever seen. Immediatly from the outset I was drawn to it as much as I am fire, acid or something really really pointy.

It's yet another found footage-esque film where a group of folks interested in documenting supernatural activity break into an asylum and.......serious dejavu.

This cost over half a million dollars to make and I'd love someone to explain to me where the money went. Was everyone overpaid? Did they have fantastic catering? Were all the cast put up in 5* hotels with travel covered and a personal masseuse? Maybe champagne and caviar for everyone in between takes? Because it sure as hell didn't go on the production.

I've seen some real stinkers in this genre, and let's be honest most of them are the same movie recycled over and over again. But this is right up there! Again it's un-engaging, it's boring, it's stupidly dark, it has pathetic character development and as is commonly the case nothing ruddy happens!

Pitiful, embarassing and yet another carbon copy movie just done worse than even usual.

The Good:

Nope

The Bad:

Seen it all before, all of it

Annoyingly dark

Poorly made from start to finish

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Maybe the budget was spent on silk toilet roll?

I tend to try to find something to enjoy and appreciate in every single horror movie I watch no matter how mediocre it may be and yet I found this obscure film to be very boring most of the time and very frustrating when not boring. It has a somewhat interesting premise, director Sean Stone plays the lead character named Sean and the other cast members also play characters named after themselves; in other words, they all seem to play themselves. Even Oliver Stone also appears as Oliver, Sean's father. The movie starts with a dinner talk about ghosts and then three youths set out to explore an abandoned insane asylum and film their exploit. For about an hour, basically nothing worthwhile happens as they walk around inside the asylum. The setting is actually quite wonderful in itself and yet it simply serves the function of being a background for the three characters to argue among themselves, the line "let's get the hell out of here" is uttered periodically! Some false and some real scares occur in the last 20 minutes or so and yet they are quite mild.

I am afraid to say, that although I watched the film this evening, my brain found it hard to comprehend the dullness that was thrust upon it, and so images of the film are already leaking away as I type this so sorry for lack of info. I am a huge fan of found footage films, which is the reason I got this. I was hoping for at least Grave Encounters level of film but instead got college student attempt at horror film... My main problems with this film is that nothing much happens, they keep shouting at each other over naff all, and you can't see a bloody thing a lot of the time! I paid 8 quid to look at darkness while people shout. I could get the same effect by hiding in an alley at night and occasionally jumping out at people while screaming boo, for free! I am being rather nice with a 2, but if I gave it a 1 I would feel even more depressed about paying the amount I did for it...