Gravedancers

The movie starts off almost as well as any horror movie I've seen. Two decent minutes of an unseen force terrorizing someone. It was almost as good as the beginning of "Bogeyman" and that's high praise from me. Unfortunately, the first two minutes of the film and the next hour and a half are only tangentially related and the movie suffers from the biggest fall-off from "scary" to "an inconsistent mess" in record time.

Early in this movie, three people are dancing and celebrating life in a graveyard. The biggest problems with this movie are the maddening internal inconsistencies. All three are dancing TOGETHER on graves. Later in the film, that reality is completely ignored and each person goes back and remembers dancing alone on different graves. This becomes a key point as each person is haunted by the respective ghost of the grave they danced on.

They might as well have shown Dracula chasing someone across the sun-splashed beaches of SoCal if you are going to get something so obviously wrong.

The main character, who has been tempted by his hot ex-girlfriend is attacked by a ghost who caught her husband cheating and ended up killing the husband and his lover with an axe. Of course this leads to a ghost with an axe chasing him and his wife. The side kick dances on the grave of a child pyromaniac, and the ex-girlfriend dances on the grave of a twisted version of a domestic abuser. Of course, as mentioned before, they didn't actually dance on separate graves, and it becomes a huge plot point that they did dance on separate graves.

The casting is outstanding, with one of the best sidekick portrayals I have seen since Buddy Lembeck/ Randall the Berzerker (Clerks). As internal consistencies continue to pop up, and we are introduced to armed ghosts who can't really take a straight right jab to the jaw, my fear melts into frustration. What a waste of thirty minutes of decent film.

Questions: It seems like a good writer was fired after turning in the first thirty pages of a good script and the director said, "We'll just shoot the rest of this on the fly, we have more than enough in our special effects budget to make up for our lack of a decent second and third acts."

Notes:
The ending is a decent rip-off of "Caddyshack" with spectral expolsives instead of Carl the Groundskeeper's dynamite.

Nothing makes a horror movie less scary than internal inconsistencies, and this movie has some big ones.

Similar movies: In this movie, they have one lunar month to solve the curse, highly reminiscent of the seven days offered by "The Ring." Instead of Gravedancers, they could have called this movie "Three Ghosts" and billed it as a spin-off of "13 Ghosts."