The game is supposed to come from 15th century Spain and yet the cards and the board are written in English with a little Latin thrown in for good measure.
"Mr Producer, I have an idea for a movie." "Oh, go on.
There have been so many cursed board game horror movies over the last 3 decades, and this one is at the lower end. The plot is mainly predictable and the acting is okay.
A group of young surfers come into possession of an ancient artifact, Mamba, an old board game made from the skin and bones of a witch executed during the Spanish Inquisition. At a drunken party one night, they casually decide to play.
Not as terrible as people are saying. Has a tinge of jumanji in there along with a bit of final destination but a really reasonable film on the whole.
Open Graves starts out as something at least different enough from the repetitive ghost stories that became too common in the last few years.Well technically it shares many similar aspects, but remains reasonably different mainly through methods of offing the victims.
First of all the film has three names ("Open graves", "The dragonfly's curse", "Gruesome game")Second of all, it wasn't really an horror movie, since it had 2 gross scenes and that was it.On top of it, the choice of snake that was made in the end of the game was wrong and didn't make sense (at least in the dubbed version)The comedy comes from the 2d effects used in snakes and in dead people that show up randomly on the highway.
I have seen far worse movies than Open Graves, but that is saying little in its favour. It does oddly enough have some redeeming values, some of the camera angles are not so bad and I'd say the same for Mike Vogel's performance.
An obnoxious group of young twerps are partying in Spain, according to the story anyway, when one of the group runs into an oddball at a curio shop. The oddball correctly sizes-up this young jerk and gives him something he really deserves: a game, supposedly from the Spanish Inquisition.
American Jason(Mike Vogel) overseas in Northern Spain encounters odd no-legged antique shop owner in a wheelchair who offers him a game which just so happens to be cursed with black magic. Once they play the game, which is supposed to grant a wish to the victor, those who participate are doomed if they draw the "epitaph" card which considers them dead.
