Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

the audience applauded

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The idea was quite good. It's about American college students in Japan traveling to the notorious "suicide forest" to make a documentary for a film class, only to be haunted and stalked the the spirits of the people who died there after a couple of friends desecrate a death site. And the forest chosen as the backdrop is haunting and beautifully photographed. But nothing else is done right. It's followed by a bunch of gory killings which occur with little logic or reason. Many victims are people who have done nothing to wrong the dead. In the end, it's just another excuse to watch young people get slaughtered in gruesome ways. I felt cheated.

Some half-Japanese girl named Maiko (pronounced "Michael" in the movie) wants to find the place where her mother committed suicide to give her a proper burial. She has nightmares and visions of a forest, of her childhood. Along for the ride come some friends of hers, foreign exchange students in Japan, who are going to...film the whole thing for a class project. Off they go then to the suicide forest, a forest in Japan where lots of people commit suicides by hanging themselves from trees. All they have to go by is a picture she has of the tree where her mother killed herself. I guess Maiko thinks it shouldn't be too hard to find a single tree in a forest. Who took the picture of the tree we don't know. She also has a box with two pieces of jewelry that belonged to the mother. She needs those for whatever ceremony she's going to perform that night, which happens to be Halloween night.When they arrive, they find a sign that bans cameras, still they film. They hide from police (why police?) that removes the corpses. And then they meet the strange stranger who knows about the forest, who makes sinister pronouncements, who warns them not to do this or that, and who recognizes (!) the tree and will guide them to it. But quickly they run into some classmates who pull a prank on them. The pranksters then go their way and run into trouble. They steal a watch from a deceased man in a tent (?). But then the guy who takes the watch is attacked. The other guys run back to the other group. At this point it's night.Maiko starts seeing things, we get to see some flashbacks from her youth about her mother, her violent father, and her sister. The stranger disappears. Maiko and the cameraguy end up arrested and handcuffed in the police station's morgue (?). Then something kills the cop, they escape, they find the tree, and more ghosts. Some of the other kids end up in trouble and injured. Then the sun comes up.Grave Halloween has a good concept. It has a gorgeous setting. The Canadian forest they used is truly beautiful. The scenes filmed during the girl's childhood also look stunning. Overall, direction is very good. But that's all this movie has going for it. While making a movie about a real-life suicide forest sounds like a good idea, you've got to have a good script to work out the idea. And here's it just doesn't work out. It's not easy making a movie about a ghost story and this one sure doesn't succeed. Things get messy and unclear. The ending comes out of nowhere. Nothing is answered. The childhood scenes don't clarify things either but create more questions. And finally a fatal flaw is the weak lead actress.

Setting off into Aokigahara Forest, a teen and her friends' mission to put to rest her lingering fears of her mother's death put them into danger when the restless spirits of the dead around them take out their anger on the group for their attitudes toward them and must find a way of stopping them.This here turned out to be quite an entertaining and enjoyable effort that gets a lot of great points about it. One of the better elements here is the use of the local custom that plays such a central part of the storyline that it really starts to feel as though the events could happen to play out as they do. Being that this is Japanese the culture and heritage of honoring one's deceased echoes throughout this one in so many ways that the great pride it places on the subject earns the eventual rampage from the ghosts later on once the mocking had been committed. It's all completely justified and rational, and that makes the ghostly actions all the more fun with several incredibly chilling gags, from simply transporting you to a different dimensional plane of reality without realizing it in order to prevent their friends from finding them in time to prevent your death, vanishing behind trees, rocks or landscape changes to avoid detection, putting your own thoughts against you and making you do something against your will or just flat- out attacking you with their ghostly powers in vicious, brutal attacks. By doing this in such a chilling and creepy location, almost seemingly filmed at the real forest itself as the attention to minute features of the area makes for an absolutely chilling, creepy area to remain the entire time, and offers up plenty of suspense from the landscape itself. With a fast pace that keeps things moving along briskly, a couple of brutal and quite bloody deaths dished out, a real sense of danger when it comes to the treatment of the cast since they're all in the firing line at some point and not too many flaws here, this is a spectacular, stand-out effort.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Language.

Maiko (Kaitlyn Leeb, Isabelle Beech as a child) is an American studying in Japan. She has disturbing dreams about a woman searching for her daughter, calling out for her. This may be because she's beginning a quest to find her birth mother (Maiko Miyauchi).Joining her in her search is a student video team that will document her journey – producer Amber (Cassie Thomson), cameraman Kyle (Graham Wardle), and sound man Terry (Dejan Loyola).The group is given a warning about the Yure ("YOU-ray," the restless souls of the suicide victims ) by a wanderer named Jin (Hiro Kanagawa), who knows the forest well and agrees to help them find where Maiko's mother committed suicide.Takeaway lesson: Do not ... Repeat, DO NOT ... enter the Suicide Forest under any circumstances.This is a SyFy Channel movie that has all the scary elements of a Japanese "obake" (ghost) story. The acting and story are okay, and actually, compared to other SyFy movies I've seen, Grave Halloween is not bad. But, the problem with SyFy movies is that they are so predictable. That's this one's problem, and this time, there's no familiar veteran actor/actress to "legitimize" the movie.The movie has only a slight relevance to Halloween, but SyFy Channel exploited that to make the movie part of their "31 Days of Halloween" observance. Pretty tacky, huh?