Wonderful character development!

Good concept, poorly executed.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Blistering performances.

A group of friends are surfing somewhere in Spain. Among them is an American guy who develops an interest for an American girl. As he walks along the streets with his Spanish friends, he walks into a store. The owner in a wheelchair gives him a box. It's actually medieval game.Later that night the group plays the game. It's a board game that where the aim is to survive. Those who die get a card with some description of how they die. The first guy to die in the game leaves to buy some drinks. He stops at a cliff, trips, falls down, and is attacked by crabs.The cops interrupt the kids. Some others die in the game. And later one of them is attacked by snakes. The other suddenly ages decades in a few seconds. Another one is in a fiery car crash.That leaves the two Americans to realize that the game has something to do with it. When they visit the guy in the wheelchair, they find him walking just fine. As it turns out, the game was made of the remains of a witch, who somehow is embodied in dragonflies. People who die in the game end up dying in similar fashion in real life. If you win the game, you get to make a wish and in a final draw of luck, you either have it come true or not. However to get to that point, they have to finish the game, which they didn't. And all the deaths have to happen first. Now they know what they have to do.Open Graves is actually an intelligent horror movie. The script and idea shows that the writers actually put a lot of thought into it. Unfortunately, in the hands in a Spanish first time director, the movie is ruined. The setting in Spain doesn't help and neither do most of the actor and actresses who know how to smile, but not much else. As with all Spanish movies, you get some Spanish guy who is irresistible to women. For a horror movie, the death scenes, except for the first one, are rather weak. Mike Vogel, who's character is one of the few compelling things in Under the Dome, and Eliza Dushku do a solid job, but unfortunately they can't save the movie.

OPEN GRAVES has a pretty good plot, its well acted by the cast, Eliza Dushku is delicious as always and the direction is okay but the film is actually not something to write home about, there aren't any real memorable moments that will leave you breathless even though some of the death scenes are rather weird, in fact there's nothing that stands out about this film, the best way to sum it up is that its nothing more than a time passer.However, where I can give it credit is that it does try to be different but unfortunately like you could've guessed it falls short, I'd say only watch this if you want to kill time and if there's nothing else to watch which is the reason I watched it in the first place.

Open Graves starts out as something at least different enough from the repetitive ghost stories that became too common in the last few years.Well technically it shares many similar aspects, but remains reasonably different mainly through methods of offing the victims. Unfortunately not different enough.As oversaturate formula demands, we quickly learn several characters are going to die because of a certain event, and after the first few deaths we already know how everything's will play out. After which we're subjected to scenes of the remaining characters, or at least the central ones trying to figure out what's causing the deaths before it's their turn.And of course, Open Graves follows the tradition of similar mystery- related films in the sense that once the cast discover an objective, any characterization disappears, the mystery itself becoming supposedly more important than giving the audience any interest in the people trying to solve it.

No Sir, I don't like it. This is one cheap, low-grade 'horror' thriller, that didn't even seem to had any good ideas of its own. It's a movie with a silly concept and silly concepts often equal silly bad movies. This movie is like a strange and bad mix of "Jumanji", "Hellraiser", "Final Destination" and whatever more. It doesn't use one good original idea and instead uses several from other movies and tried to combine it. Ineffectivly though. And perhaps this is the movie its biggest problem. The problem isn't necessarily the lack of originality but more the way it handles its concepts. Everything gets developed and executed quite poorly into the movie, which makes the overall movie a terrible ineffective one. It's just not a movie that ever gets tense, surprising or intriguing. There is basically no real reason why you should ever watch this movie, since it really doesn't have any redeeming qualities in it. No, it's hardly the worst thing you'll ever see but that doesn't mean you should watch it. You just can never get into this movie because of its lacking story and poor characters. It's a very distant movie, that tries to be mysterious but instead works out as lame and annoying. It involves some strange old board game, that causes those who play and loose it to die. Sounds good perhaps but the way it's being handled in this movie is far from interesting. We don't even get to know how the game works and what's exactly the point of the existence of such a game, what the rules are and how to win it, in the first place. The 'explaination' at the end doesn't really cover this and is just too out of tone with the rest of the movie that it feels totally wrong and bad. Bad as an horror, bad as a thriller, bad as a mystery. There are just no redeeming qualities in it. 4/10