THE GRAVES

Sisters Megan (Clare Grant) and Abby (Jillian Murray) Graves take a road trip to Arizona in the hope of one final weekend of rock music and adventure before Megan embarks on that scariest of fates: a career.

They stop off along the way at a couple of convenience stores and diners, giving us the chance to witness their wry humour, mutual love of comic books and equally mutual disdain for country folk. Especially Reverend Stockton (Tony Todd), who freaks them out simply by walking into the same diner they're eating at. Well, they have just heard him babbling maniacally on their car radio. And, hang on, is that Amanda Wyss (Tina in the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) serving them ...?!

Elsewhere, four curious teenagers foolishly wander into the abandoned-seeming Skull City mine, just a few minutes away from the diner. Curiosity kills the teenagers in gruesome style, by which time the Graves girls have coincidentally turned up in the area to mooch about.

Megan and Abby witness one bloody murder and overhear the killer - an oversized Hillbilly called Jonah (Shane Stevens) on his walkie-talkie being warned that they are trespassing on his patch. Crikey, they'd best run.

They do run, straight back to their car. Predictably, it won't start. They're miles away from anywhere else of trust and don't appear to have mobile telephones with them. So they run some more, this time further into the Nevada desert as mad redneck brute Jonah gives chase.

The girls manage to survive this ordeal, and even pick up the sole male survivor of the other teenagers along the way. But what they see in the meantime is far too weird to make sense of: Jonah kills people and they then emit deafening shrieks into the sunny skies. What is the redneck doing, and why?

No matter, our girls don't much care when a truck pulls up and they assume the friendly-faced Caleb (Bill Moseley) is there to save them. But no, Caleb pulls a rifle on the bewildered trio and leads them back towards the mine so he can survey Jonah's bloodshed for himself. Oh crumbs, it turns out that Caleb is part of the mining family: he likes to wear a fake pig nose and sing "Baby Please Don't Go" while preparing to terrorise and kill.

So the girls must now fend for survival against Caleb, all the while aware that a greater evil may well be at play in Skull City mine - after all, why is it that they appear to be witnessing souls leaving the fresh corpses?

Stick around to find out if you like, but I guarantee you'll be struggling to care by the halfway mark. It's not that performances are that bad - they're adequate - or that the film is ugly (actually the cinematography and locations are extremely pleasing). It's not that there aren't any twists, because there are in fact a couple.

It's not that there are no veteran genre actors of note to entice viewers in: the inclusion of Todd, Moseley and Wyss sees to that.

It's that writer-director Brian Pulido - the guy semi-responsible for Chaos Comics' not altogether sterling creation, Lady Death (cited by the Graves sisters as the best comic book ever) - doesn't have a clue how to inject energy, wit or originality into his banal film.

True, THE GRAVES is pretty gory at times. Yes, it's fairly slick and the lighting is as proficient as the locations are alluring. The pace never falters and the two leads are hot. But this simply never comes to life: it's a weird mix of tired conventions, ripe dialogue ("I'll take my time with you" growls Caleb, like every other onscreen killer of the last two decades has done) and unscary horror. Worse still, the whole thing comes across as being smug.

The film is presented uncut in anamorphic 1.78:1 and looks very attractive. Colours and flesh tones are accurate, while images are sharp and grain is non-existent.

Two audio mixes present the film in English 2.0 and 5.1 respectively. Both are well-balanced affairs offering good bassy music and nice upfront dialogue.

An animated main menu page opens to sun-kissed deserts, cool characters and surf rock. It all looks disconcertingly 'post-Tarantino' from the offing.

From there, a static scene-selection menu allows access to the main feature via 12 chapters.

A generous helping of extras begins with "Behind The Screams", a 20-minute featurette which mixes cast and crew snippets with clips from the film. It's as much about the storyline as it is the film's making. In other words, this widescreen effort is little more than a vanity project. Pulido is under the misapprehension that his film is totally cool, while Moseley and Todd seem overly gracious about their comparatively unknown co-stars.

"Sound Designing The Graves" is a fairly self-explanatory title for the next little documentary. This one offers 5 minutes of insight into post-production of the film in an audio suite. There are some interesting before/after comparisons, set to timecoded widescreen film footage.

5 minutes of audition footage follows, and is - for the most part - mildly embarrassing.

"Plan To Actual" is another 5 minute featurette. An edit of film clips and documentary footage turns out to be some kind of badly pieced-together location documentary.

Next up is "No Regrets Tattoo", yet another 5 minute offering that this time provides a handheld video account of the crew's jaunt to local tattoo parlour No Regrets (as seen in an early film scene) for some permanent ink relating to the film. Depressingly, one bloke is asked "will your Dad be okay with this?"

"Spot The Gnome" is a one-minute introduction from Pulido inviting you to play a game during the film. Can you guess what the game might be?

"Vampires Don't Exist" claim Calabrese in the cheap music video that follows. They look like rockabillies but sound more like Iron Maiden. It's not a bad way to spend 3 minutes.

Finally, we get the original trailer for THE GRAVES, which succeeds in being a fun 98-second preview presented in non-anamorphic widescreen.

THE GRAVES is not a very likeable film (take a peek through Tony Todd's resume and find a film that is, barring CANDYMAN), but it comes on a very nice disc. Perhaps the sequel THE GRAVES 2: RETURN TO SKULL CITY will also get the Special Edition treatment. But I'll be in no rush to see it.

Review by Stu Willis