The Gravedancers – After Dark Horrorfest

This is quite possibly my favorite of the original 8 films to die for that made up the first after dark horrorfest. There are but two things that I didn’t like and one thing that annoyed me.

The film opens with an unseen killer dispatching an unknown woman by beating her and hanging her above a flight of stairs. This is one of the things I didn’t like. It happens one year prior to the film’s actual events and while we can assume that the poor woman suffered a similar fate to our three main characters there isn’t even a throwaway line to explain this event ever happening before. After this the film becomes a coming home, reunion style film with three very different friends rekindling their friendship with the death of their 4th Musketeer as the catalyst. For some reason (alcohol) the three decide to celebrate their friend’s demise by dancing on several graves. As one would expect, the spirits from those graves don’t take kindly to that kind of activity and follow our three heroes home.

The rest is a series of eerie happenings, assaults, an enjoyable paranormal expert, and several tasks to accomplish if they want to see the light of the next day.

The acting is glorious with the annoying exception of Marcus Thomas as Sid. His acting would make him the stand out star of most of the Horrorfest, but with the company he keeps in this film he is grossly out of place. Every time he delivered a line I started to cringe.

The only other thing I did not like happens near the end. As we are in the middle of the final, brutal showdown there suddenly appears a giant CG head. We the audience being of sound mind are suddenly removed violently from our state of suspended belief and assaulted with this waste of money. I would have preferred the cast be thrown around by nothing.

The Nitty Gritty: Scale of 0 to 10

Camp Factor – 1 (I only give it a camp rating at all due to the giant, unnecessary floating CG head)

Gore – 5 (corpses, bite marks, throat cutting, and Dominic Purcell dancing)

Creep Factor – 7 (spooky sounds, Chopin, and being attacked by an unseen force that sometimes leaves footprints of flame)

Nudity/Sex – 0 (you will get more on the CW)

Jump Scenes – 4

Verdict: I obviously rated this against much bigger budget films and critiqued it quite a bit harder than its brothers and sisters on the horrorfest, but this film deserves it. If you must watch only a handful of horror films a year then this should be on the list.