Movie Review: Documenting The Grey Man (2012)

It's tough to make a ghost story scary these days. It's especially tough when you have a bad script and worse acting. Let me take a few steps back here. I don't want to come out with fists flying at this movie. Combining genres can't be easy to do. Let's take this ghost story and insert it into a found footage movie. That should fix it. Nope. No, not at all. Hmm. These are two genres that I'm not very fond of, and they combine to make a movie I'm not very fond of. I really and truly don't like writing negative reviews. I'd rather enjoy every movie I see, but it doesn't work that way. Let's just take a look at the film.



We start with a director talking to his crew about a little scam he cooked up. There's a well known house supposedly haunted by The Grey Man that has new residents. He contacted the residents and told them that he was the head of a ghost hunting team. The plan is to pretend they're a team and scare the hell out of the family to get a movie made. It's scummy, but his crew agrees and all settles into their roles. They arrive at the house and set up cameras everywhere. The matriarch of the family is willing to share all of the haunting experiences they've had. The problem is that they've only been there a week. How many experiences could they have had?

A few odd things happen. The lead female of the crew is getting dragged out of a doorway at one point, and when the director grabs her and pulls her back, nobody closes the door, and she's expected to go to sleep like nothing happened. Also, the husband in the family yells about the wife contacting the fake ghost hunters. That's contradictory to what we heard earlier. There are many moments like this in which I just sat up and said, "Wait, what?"

The worst thing about this movie is that it actually starts to get good. That happens about ten minutes before the movie ends. I don't get it. A few interesting things happen, and that's it. It's not like the movie is long and needed to be cut. It was hardly over an hour. It was like jerking off with no lube and finally having someone walk in on you right as you finish. Lots of wasted time to get to a dissatisfying ending. I say pass on this one. Even for a short movie, it's not worth your time.