If you’ve ever wandered into the horror section of a bargain-bin DVD rack and thought, “What’s the worst thing in here?” congratulations: you’ve found The Graveyard. This 2006 slasher “film” (and I use that word as generously as calling Taco Bell “Mexican cuisine”) is the third and mercifully final installment in the Bloody Murder series, a spin-off that proves some franchises are less like trees branching out and more like mold creeping up your bathroom wall.
It’s cheap. It’s predictable. And it makes Leprechaun in the Hood look like The Godfather.
Opening: The Worst Game of Hide and Seek Ever
The film begins with a group of “friends” (quotation marks because their chemistry is about as warm as a tax audit) playing midnight hide and seek in a cemetery. Because when you’re young and dumb, breaking into Placid Pines Cemetery at midnight just screams fun night out.
Eric, chosen as the seeker, opens his eyes to find a masked man with a knife. He panics, bolts, and ends up impaled on a fence like a human shish kebab. Surprise: the masked killer was just their buddy Bobby pulling a prank. Except the prank ends with Eric dead, which is less “ha-ha” and more “oops, 20 years in prison.” Bobby gets charged with manslaughter, while the others skate free. Lesson: in horror movies, the law works like Monopoly—you just hope you draw the “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
Five Years Later: The Reunion Nobody Wanted
Michelle, Eric’s ex and Bobby’s ex-lover (she apparently collects men like Funko Pops), organizes a “closure weekend” at a campsite near the cemetery. Because nothing says closure like revisiting the exact spot where your best friend got kebabed. The friends show up, all a little older but definitely not wiser.
Enter Peter, the groundskeeper, who looks friendly but has that “I definitely have human remains in my shed” vibe. Spoiler: he’s not Peter. He’s Adam, Eric’s brother, who faked his death by burning his own house down and planting Eric’s corpse like it was part of a Home Depot sale. If that sounds convoluted, trust me—it plays even dumber on screen.
The Kill Scenes: Sponsored by Dollar Tree
Slasher films live and die on their kills. Unfortunately, The Graveyard dies. Repeatedly.
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Veronica: Wanders off for a shower, gets slashed. Honestly, her biggest mistake was signing the contract for this movie.
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Allie: Dead. Cause of death: being in this movie.
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Jack: Dead too. His sex scene ends prematurely (metaphor for the film’s runtime dragging on too long).
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Sarah: Accidentally electrocuted by Charlie. Yes, electrocuted. In a slasher film. Who needs Freddy Krueger when you’ve got OSHA violations?
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Charlie: Bitten in the eye by a rattlesnake. I wish I were making that up. Somewhere, even Samuel L. Jackson is shaking his head thinking, not like this.
None of these deaths are scary, creative, or even bloody enough to satisfy gorehounds. It’s like watching a community theater production of Friday the 13th where the special effects budget was twenty bucks and a coupon for ketchup packets.
The Characters: Paper-Thin and Still Too Much
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Michelle: Organizes the reunion, because apparently therapy was too expensive.
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Bobby: Ex-con, framed as the red herring. Thinks glaring at everyone counts as character development.
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Adam/Peter: The killer. His motive? Revenge for his brother’s death. His method? Overcomplicated nonsense. His disguise? Walmart “creepy groundskeeper” clearance aisle.
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The Rest: Meat puppets to be killed off in increasingly dumb ways. Their personalities range from “slightly annoying” to “kill me now.”
The writing tries to make us care about their trauma, but the acting is flatter than a pancake in a steamroller factory. Watching these characters is like being stuck at a high school reunion where everyone is boring and you’re the one who forgot to bring booze.
The Twist: Adam’s Discount Revenge Plot
Halfway through, we learn Peter is actually Adam, Eric’s brother. Adam burned down his house, swapped bodies with his dead sibling, and decided the best way to handle his grief was cosplaying as Jason Voorhees. This is the sort of Scooby-Doo twist where you half expect someone to yank his mask off while he shouts, “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”
But instead of unmasking, Adam drags Michelle into a graveyard for a creepy game of “run while I chase you.” Subtlety is dead here, buried somewhere under the fake tombstones.
The Ending: Because Why Not
Michelle survives thanks to Bobby’s convenient return, and Adam gets shot. But—shocker—his body isn’t found. In the final scene, Michelle and Bobby are sitting in a police car, relieved it’s all over… until the driver turns out to be Adam. Because nothing says “thrilling cliffhanger” like rehashing the ending of Halloween but with less suspense and more groaning.
The last image is Adam’s smirk in the rearview mirror, which is less terrifying and more “creepy Uber driver.”
The Horror: Missing, Presumed Dead
The real tragedy of The Graveyard isn’t the deaths onscreen—it’s the death of tension. Every slasher trope is here: masked killer, isolated woods, sex equals death, final girl. But none of it works. The kills are uninspired, the pacing is slower than a funeral dirge, and the scares are about as effective as a wet sponge in a knife fight.
Even the jump scares feel like the movie gave up. At one point, a character literally yells “Boo!” because apparently the director couldn’t be bothered to stage an actual scare.
Dark Humor Takeaways
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The movie is called The Graveyard because that’s where your hopes and dreams go to die after watching it.
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The killer’s big plan hinges on people actually caring about Eric’s death. Spoiler: the audience doesn’t.
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The snake bite scene proves the writers ran out of ideas and just started pulling deaths out of a hat labeled “National Geographic.”
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Bobby spends five years in prison for a prank, while everyone else goes camping like they’re auditioning for a bad REI commercial. If that’s not horror, what is?
Final Verdict: Bury This One
The Graveyard is the cinematic equivalent of being forced to attend a funeral for someone you barely knew, in the rain, without an umbrella. It’s grim, joyless, and drawn out longer than necessary. Even diehard slasher fans will find themselves checking their watches, wondering how a movie about masked killers in a graveyard could be this boring.
It’s not scary. It’s not funny. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s just dead on arrival.
