Me and my Girlfriend enjoyed a KFC and a Cool film called Open Grave this weekend. Starring the awesome Sharlto Copley of District 9 fame, the film is a suspense mystery, starting with a man waking to find himself in a pit of dead bodies without any memory of who he is or how he had got there. He finds others in a near by house, who also cant remember anything.

He did not drink the cool aid!

There has been plenty of films where the plot evolves around people not being able to remember who they are, they even used this plot in the first Resident Evil film. Usually the character will ask all the right quetsions, where am I, who am I and what is happening. Unfortunately, it would seem the cast of Open grave quite like their missing memories, as no one really questions anything apart from “Who am I?”. You have a pit full of dead bodies, you start finding bodies tied to trees and you find random people who clearly have something wrong with them, yet at no point do any of the characters ask “What is going on?”. Nobody seems to care about what’s going on around them, nobody seems shocked or upset by any of the bodies, and no body makes any real attempt of finding out about themselves or their surroundings.

He’s a little tied up right now.

There’s a lot of shouting and pointing guns, but no real communication going on between the group of strangers (Friends? Lovers? Enemies?), in fact, I’d go as far as saying that most of the dialogue is exposition, with no real effort made to flesh out any of the characters or to give them any real personality. And i think that’s where the film falls apart, the dialogue is just so boring and flat. There’s no human element to it, its like it was written by cyborgs.

Look out..He’s got a shooter!

Whilst the dialogue and characters are slow and tedious, the story, or at least the idea behind the story, is actually very good. I’m a huge fan of plague or zombie films. I love the idea of isolation and devastation of all that we know. It takes out so far out of our safe zones and throws us into an completely different existence. Open Grave plays with this, having some sort of plague that is sending people mad. The extent of the plague is never know, and this is not a bad thing. I think it’s too easy to spoon feed people with information these days, its good to have a few unanswered questions. However, the film does not explore the isolation brought on by the plague , nor does it even question it.

It’s probably just a case of the sniffles.

What really pissed me off was the MacGuffin. The Number 18 kept popping up, and it totally did not pay off. Lets face it, the script is awful, and this ending just makes no sense. Why specifically on the 18th? How did everybody know about this, as the number was circled on a map and painted on the wall? Why would an army send 5 troops to wipe out everyone in the house? What’s the point? Why were these people so important that they needed to be shot rather then just letting them die of the plague? Answers on a post card!

Outwitted by the high-tech security fence.

There’s a lot wrong with this film, and little right, but I did enjoy it. I found the entire film so frustrating, the characters are all just so stupid and their lack of communication and their inability to discovery anything does not help the film at all. I wanted the mysteries to be real mysteries, I wanted the dialogue to be more personal and above all else , I wanted Characters that felt real. The film sufferers from a terribly written script and when you have that, no amount of anything else is going save that.

Me and the missus enjoyed the film, but we enjoyed our greasy bucket of chicken better!