Clare Kramer

31 Years, 31 Screams: The Gravedancers

Director Mike Mendez made a head-turning genre debut a few years ago with the horror-comedy The Convent, and, while this follow-up is more serious in tone, it’s still mostly successful.

Like many horror films, including a few from the After Dark Horrorfest film festival, The Gravedancers uses one of those old urban legends whose sole purpose is to scare us into not engaging in bad behavior. In this case, it’s not picking up hitchhikers, nor is it answering the phone when you’re babysitting. It’s not even avoiding red M&Ms. Instead, The Gravedancers gives us the much-needed PSA on not dancing on graves.

Harris, Sid, Dev and Kira were the Three Musketeers plus one. Unfortunately, they’ve drifted apart over the last few years. The only thing that has brought them back together is Dev’s funeral. Sid (Marcus Thomas) decides that having a few drinks at a bar just isn’t enough of a tribute, so he wants to meet at the graveyard to say goodbye.

Against their better judgment, Harris (Dominic Purcell of Prison Break fame) and Kira (Josie Maran) meet him there. It seems Harris and Kira have a sort of thing going on between them, which obviously doesn’t sit well with his wife Allison ("Buffy’s" Clare Kramer). The three get a little tipsy, and Sid finds a poem left on Dev’s grave that advises the reader to enjoy life while it lasts. Sid takes that to mean a little dancing, and the other two join in, becoming the "gravedancers" of the title.

That’s what we in horror movies call "a really bad idea."

A few weeks later, Allison begins to experience some freaky phenomena. The pipes in their house don’t work. The doors seem to open and close by themselves. Oh, and she’s hearing the sounds of a moaning woman coming from their bedroom. Harris is skeptical until he congratulates his wife on learning Chopin on the piano only to find out that she’s not even in the house.

When a woman appears in their bedroom in the middle of the night, Allison becomes convinced that Kira is stalking Harris, trying to drive a wedge between them. Harris and Allison go to Kira’s house to confront her about it and find her huddled in her bathtub, the victim of some apparent supernatural rape.

A little investigation makes it clear that Harris, Kara and Sid are all being haunted by the ghosts of the people whose graves were desecrated. As if that’s not enough, it turns out they danced on the graves of "undesirables." Harris danced on the grave of a spurned mistress who killed her lover’s wife with an ax. Sid danced on the grave of a little firebug who burned down his own house. Kira got the worst of the deal, though, having danced on the grave of a rapist and masochist who kept his own torture chamber. What kind of town is this?!

Our haunted quartet seeks the help of paranormalists Vincent and Culpepper (Tchéky Karyo and Meghan Perry). At first, the paranormalists are all about the study. You know, trying to prove that ghosts really do exist, a fact that is helpfully demonstrated when Sid’s ghost leaves flaming footprints in his floor.

Of course, the gravedancers want a way out, not to be part of a university term paper. Vincent theorizes that they can either wait it out until the next full moon, which won’t work because the ghosts are becoming more powerful, or they can try to dig up the bones and rebury them, once again giving them a consecrated resting place.

That would go fine except for one tiny detail that I won’t spoil for you here. Instead, our heroes are forced into a fight to the death with their spectral tormentors in the final act, and *that’s* where Mendez does some of his best work.

The basic story of The Gravedancers doesn’t exactly break any new ground, but Mendez keeps everything so straight-faced and unpretentious that the film comes off as much better than many of its rivals. A true horror connoisseur can spot many of the film’s influences from Evil Dead to The Haunting of Hill House to Robert Zemeckis’ over-the-top The Frighteners.

With a few exceptions, the cast does a tremendous job with the material, taking the genre seriously rather than looking down on it. Kramer, who is arguably the biggest name star in the cast, takes a significantly less glamorous role than the goddess Glory on Buffy. Thankfully, though, she brings a lot of warmth to a character who would otherwise be limited to scowling at her husband and screaming a lot. Meghan Perry (who also had a bit part on Buffy) threatens to walk away with the film, though, as the Velma-inspired Culpepper. You half-expect her to start shouting "jinkies." The weak link of the cast has to be Marcus Thomas, who was given the role by the production company over character actor David Moscow, who would have been infinitely better in the role. That’s not entirely a knock on Thomas, but Moscow excels in this kind of role.

The Gravedancers may not be for all tastes, especially those looking for a lot of gore or nudity with their scares, but it does have some moments that will make you jump out of your skin. Oddly enough, when Scream first burst onto the scene in the 1990’s, genre fans were happy to have a movie that didn’t take itself so seriously. Now, ten years later, it seems that it’s those winking, self-reflexive post-modern films that come of as pretentious while solid, well-executed films like The Gravedancers are finding their way back into the mainstream.