The Graves
The Graves DVD (Brian Pulido, Anchor Bay 2009)
For his first cinematic outing, the creator of the comics ‘Evil Ernie’ and ‘Lady Death’ opts for a desert survival horror story along the lines of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and ‘Tourist Trap’. Two sisters who are into horrorcore music and underground comics take off for a last road trip before the elder sibling starts her new marketing job. Unable to resist the lure of a supposedly haunted old west silver mine, they stumble across a bizarre desert community who kill all newcomers as part of a soul harvest in honour of a supernatural deity they believe to be God. The sisters have to fight for their lives when the town blacksmith – the massive Shane Stevens, here looking like a dead ringer for Rob Zombie – tries to pummel them with a sledge hammer. The sisters succeed in killing him, only for his even sicker brother (Bill ‘Choptop’ Moseley) to arrive, don a plastic pig nose and hunt them down with a rusty sickle in scenes that reminded me of ‘Switchblade Romance’. At first the sisters (and the viewers) think they have strayed into ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ territory, but they discover that there is method to the town’s madness, and the deity that the locals worship is about to make its presence known… ‘The Graves’ has three things going for it: superb location filming at a genuine old west ghost town, the always watchable Bill Moseley doing his mischievous psycho routine, and Tony ‘Candyman’ Todd as the raving, jiving, bouncing-on-his-toes preacher who leads the killer community. On the flip side, the film suffers from repetitive scenes of the sisters running from one hiding place to another, and after a while one desert wash looks pretty much the same as another. I’m also not sure that scenes demonstrating the feral state that the supernatural presence invokes in those who enter its presence fully work, but Pulido does a good job of making his two heroines believable and credible characters, and you genuinely care about what happens to them – no mean feat in any horror movie. ‘The Graves’ is a lot like the videos you used to hire when you were bunking off school – you’re probably never going to watch it a second time, but it delivers the goods and offers plenty of simple, straightforward fun. A sequel is in the works, by the way. Liam Ronan
