DVD Review: Zombie Mystery OPEN GRAVE With Sharlto Copley Lacks Life

A zombie-amnesia thriller, Open Grave is a film with some solid ideas, however Gonzalo López-Gallego fails to do anything with them. Star, Sharlto Copley is left stranded with little to do as the mysterious stranger who wakes up in an open grave, surrounded by dead people. Is he responsible for their deaths? Maybe or maybe not, as it could be the five other people with amnesia who inhabit a nearby house. Writers Chris and Eddie Borey have written a film with a lot of questions but the meandering plot means that you’ll probably be too bored to want to hang around for the answer.

Open Grave shuffles along as slow and plodding as the zombie-infected creatures which feature on screen. Gonzalo López-Gallego has issues creating tension, or even putting together a thrilling action sequence. His film doesn’t run much more than 90 minutes, but boy, it feels like it’s an hour longer than that. It doesn’t help that things become repetitive as our protagonists wonder through the woods and a deserted farm house doing very little.

Acting-wise, no one comes away from Open Grave as anything other than barely adequate. Coppley, so good in District 9, feels a few notches above the rest of the cast but he’s given some terrible lines and woeful motivation. Maybe Open Grave worked on the page, but nothing works on the screen.

A horror with no scares, a thriller with no thrills and a mystery that’s very boring, Open Grave is a film that fails on nearly every level. Fans of Copley will be saddened to see him in something so lacklustre. This is one for diehard zombie fanatics only, and even they will be disappointed by this moribund effort. This one should be buried at the bottom of the DVD pile.