Main cast: Mike Vogel (Jason), Eliza Dushku (Erica), Ethan Rains (Tomàs), Naike Rivelli (Helena), Lindsay Caroline Robba (Lisa), Gary Picker (Detective Izar), Alex O’Dogherty (Malek), Boris Martinez (Pablo), and Ander Pardo (Miguel)
Director: Alvaro de Armiñan
Open Graves is one of those movies that I had to watch when I was down with a bad flu, mostly because there is nothing left for me to do, and it’s a pretty generic movie likely done because it was the craze at that time to make slasher movies with pretty people getting killed one by one.
And if that premise sounds overdone, been there, and got the T-shirt, that’s because that’s what it is.
Basically, we have a bunch of people in Spain, to party and take photos of themselves or something. The ones that stand out the most in a cast of cardboard characters are Jason, the blandest one and hence the most likable by default, Erica the fellow American tourist that he takes a fancy to because she’s played by Eliza Dushku, and Jason’s friend Tomàs because he is easily the biggest jackass of the lot.
They and the rest of who-cares play some board game made from the skin of some witch despite knowing that it’s probably not the smartest thing to do. Basically, people take part, roll dice, get eliminated when they get a card that contains some cryptic poem about some painful deaths, and lo and behold, those people quickly die in the way described by the card they pulled. There can only be one person left standing, and that person will be granted their wish.
So, yes, people start dying as Jason and Erica try to figure out what is happening to them, and that’s basically it. It’s pretty obvious who will be the last one standing.
Oh, and rogue cop is determined to get the board game so that he can has his own wish come true, but for the most part, he’s a nothing burger of a character.
With the characters so bland, I’d expect the movie will up the gore to keep things interesting but sadly, that is not the case. It serves “horror” in the form of some of the most amateurish CGI ever, even for 2009, and the whole thing becomes a bad PlayStation 1 video game cutscene each time the CGI shows up.
Meanwhile, the emotional core of the movie is on Mike Vogel’s lovely shoulders, but while the man is pretty, his idea of emoting is to scrunch up his face and pout most unattractively all the time — and that’s the limit of his acting range.
In the end, this is a very predictable movie that rehashes all the familiar tropes of the genre, but without any halfway decent gore, T&A, or acting to keep things interesting. What’s the point of its existence, really?
