THE GRAVEYARD

A group of teenagers goes to the Placid Pines cemetery at night to play hide-and-seek, but due to a stupid prank, one of them is killed and only Bobby is accused of murder and sentenced to prison. Five years later, taking advantage of the provisional freedom granted to Bobby, his sister Michelle, who was also present the night of the tragedy, organizes a reunion for all the former friends who had lost touch after that tragic night. The meeting was organized in a cabin in the woods, right next to the Placid Pines cemetery, but soon the boys will begin to fall victim to the murderous fury of a mysterious masked killer. That the slasher genre is repetitive and highly predictable is well known by now, but it is rare to come across a concentrate of clichés and naive plot twists as in "The Graveyard," the latest distributive effort of the Italian Gargoyle Video. "The Graveyard" is nothing more than a flimsy low-budget slasher that plunders everything possible from the more glorious past of the slasher movie: it starts with a prologue that is quite evidently reminiscent of "Don't Go in the House" (later partly reprised, with due variations, in "I Know What You Did Last Summer"), with the exception that in Paul Lynch's film it is more plausible teenagers playing hide-and-seek and then causing the accident, while in "The Graveyard" there are rather unbelievable and quite stupid young men in their twenties. Then it continues by stealing locations and narrative solutions that come directly from the "Friday the 13th" saga: from the mountain cabin to the chases in the forest, from the horny couples to the characters introduced simply to be slaughtered. This fair of déjà vu concludes with a killer who inexplicably wears a mask identical to Leatherface's from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and a final solution of disarming predictability (it is possible to intuit not only the identity but also the motive of the killer twenty minutes into the film!). As tradition dictates, the characters are characterized with sympathetic ink, as they are so evanescent and superficial that in this case they are not even the classic stereotypes of the genre, but only simple figures placed here to be slaughtered by the killer. And so we come to the other sore point of the film: the murders. A film as sloppy and unoriginal as "The Graveyard" had as its only lifeline to stage a series of original and bloody murders, a solution adopted by several recent productions that found themselves in the same conditions; but this film fails even to exploit the splatter-gore solution, staging only banal murders that, when they do not end with off-screen, rely on a simple stab or are even ridiculous if they attempt the road of originality (see the boy bitten by the snake that was hidden under his bed). If we then move on to the technical-artistic aspect, things do not improve at all, since the meanness of a lazy screenplay and the incompetence of the entire cast are added to a television-like photography and a bland and anonymous direction. "The Graveyard" is therefore a negligible slasher that adds nothing to the genre, but rather, where possible, does nothing but copy from the famous ancestors. Worse circulates in the home video circuits, to be clear, but this film is still positioned in the lowest steps of recent overseas horror production.