Hollows Grove

I was lucky enough to see a pre-screening of this movie, but I have to say that if I paid too see it in theaters, I wouldn't have been disappointed. For a scary movie, especially a low budget one, this is really good. Initially everybody watching it with me complained about the slow build and the fact that we were sick of the flood of "home movie" style scary movies. But this movie made up did it all very well. For starters, the home movie style isn't the same as in most movies. The camera isn't constantly running, shaking, flipping, and falling. It's steady for about 90% of the movie, and I thoroughly appreciate that. And the slow build I spoke about earlier is necessary, it helped me to settle in before it scared me. Which it definitely did. It didn't do it with crazy cheap scares or jump scenes, but with that slow build I mentioned earlier. It built the tension and then cut through it. The characters are pretty well developed and the acting is good. Nobody is going to win any Oscars for this, but I wasn't left wanting anything from the actors. Everybody played their part, and they played it well. The story is the usual "we go to a haunted place and discover it's actually haunted" but the perspective is pretty different. Though the movie was semi-predictable, it kept me and everybody I watched it with on the edge of our seats, especially near the end. My only real complaint about this movie is the beginning and end scenes with the detective. It made it seem too much like an interactive movie at Universal Studios or something. But stay after the credits, and the bad ending scene makes up for itself.

Hollow's grove is not a very good film at all, the plot is very simple, go into scary place and get scared for an hour. The acting is sub-par and the scares aren't clever, it does a decent job in places of building tension but that's it. It reminded me of those ghost hunting shows they have on the television but this time they don't bother to pretend it's real.

2/10: Poor acting and a rubbish cliched script make this an awful watch

Yet another movie trying to take advance of the presence of this God of cinema called Lance Henriksen, putting him almost on the cover but not so much on the screen. Don't know why he puts up with this, he can and always will do better than this!

Now about the movie: I've seen too many like this. Nothing new out of production, acting, plot, scares, ideas, only difference between movies like this or SxTape, Grave Encounters and so many others simply consist on the director's decision or sometimes on the length of the film. Here, they kept it short, I do appreciate quality over quantity but as said they brought absolutely nothing new. Reason to recommend it? Only to pass the time if you are in the dying need of a time killer.

No point in saying more than needed, watch it, don't watch it, it all comes up to you. If you do so, expect the expected, you'll get just that. Another typical found footage film, with a crew going inside an abandoned hospital where strange things begin to happen. Ba da dumb!

Cheers!

I can't believe the good reviews here, the only good thing I can say about this haunted hospital mess is that it might be slightly better than that nepotistic abomination from Oliver Stone's kid and some other movie that tried way too hard for lovable characters and scares and failed on both, and that one was set in a prison hospital, so if you want to be picky then it doesn't count here. I also can't recall the titles of those movies and don't care enough to find them again, so they may actually be better than Hollows Grove.

First, the dialog the characters use for their show's narrative is so insipid, inane and uninformative that I could almost believe it was intentionally done as a statement on the stupidity of the typical reality show, but I don't know if I can give the writers that much credit, since the characters' dialog is just as bad in their interactions with each other. The film also feels like it takes forever to get anywhere, focusing too much and too long on building cliché characters who ultimately contribute nothing to the story beyond a body count.

I did wind up giving the film three stars for some of the better effects, but I think I was feeling too generous. And I won't even talk about the FBI ending, as that was bad enough to cause the entire film to lose a star, now that I think about it.

You want the same storyline? Just watch Grave Encounters again.

Hello everyone, I don't speak English very well, but I was not too lazy to even go to the translator. Looking for a super low budget version of Grave Encounters? So this is it. The film absorbed all the disadvantages, weaknesses at the same time losing the main advantages of Grave Encounters - the atmosphere of horror, appropriate humor flowing first into a thriller and then into a full-fledged horror. The director of this film, as well as the rest of the crew with the exception of Lance Henriksen, did not give anything worth watching either before or after this film. Who gave the money for this? Why does this even have one star at all? This is an excellent guide to how not to make films, how not to write a script, how not to act and how not to make scenery. Don't waste time on this movie, especially if you are a horror fan (like me) because you will experience pain and shame from this movie.