Final Screening Review: Gravestoned (2009) — When “So Bad It’s Good” Digs Up a Whole New Level

Final Screening Review: Gravestoned (2009) — When “So Bad It’s Good” Digs Up a Whole New Level

FINAL SCREENING: GRAVESTONED (2009)

A love letter to bad ideas, buried deep in stoner horror hell.

Welcome to another entry in FINAL SCREENING, Horror Movies Uncut’s rare reviews countdown celebrating the season of fear — where we shine a flashlight on the forgotten, the bizarre, and the downright cursed corners of genre cinema. Tonight’s resurrection? A long-buried oddity from 2009 called Gravestoned, directed by Michael McWillie — a name so obscure, his last known credit was a short film from 1979.

Yes, you read that right. Thirty years later, McWillie returned to deliver a direct-to-video stoner horror movie that feels equal parts fever dream, student film, and inside joke that went way too far.

The plot — if you can call it that — follows two brothers, Shark (Joe Glass) and Coltrane (Ivan Jones), who work in props and decide to use real body parts to impress a terrible filmmaker looking for “authenticity.” Naturally, their decision awakens a corpse wielding a machete, and chaos unfolds — featuring cheerleaders, grave-digging stoners, and a random Scottish Terrier that may or may not have more purpose than some of the human characters.

It’s a film stitched together from pure DIY audacity and late-night weed logic. The shots are chaotic. The edits feel like a demo reel. The dialogue sounds half-improvised, half-forgotten. And yet… it’s weirdly hypnotic. Like a VHS tape you find in the back of a thrift store labeled “Don’t Watch.”

But here’s the thing: Gravestoned is what indie horror is all about. It’s messy. It’s rough. It’s sincere in its delusion. McWillie’s film is a reminder that horror’s most charming roots are in the why nots — filmmakers who said screw it, grabbed a camera, and just made something. Whether it’s good or bad is secondary. The film exists, and somehow that’s enough to give it a strange kind of respect.

Sure, it’s terrible. But it’s terrible in a way that feels planned — or at least joyfully self-aware. Every absurd plot turn, every moment of unearned confidence, every limp kill scene feels like a wink to the audience that says, “We know this is dumb, but we’re doing it anyway.”

By the time you realize you could’ve turned it off, you’re too deep in. You’ve given yourself over to the weirdness. You start laughing — not at it, but with it. That’s the beauty of the Gravestoned experience: you stop judging and start surrendering.

There’s no mistaking it — this is stoner horror at its lowest vibration, but damn if it doesn’t somehow become endearing because of it. I can’t say I enjoyed it in the traditional sense, but I respected it for being the definition of independent cinema that truly doesn’t care what you think.

Rating: 2 out of 5

It’s rough, wild, and barely functional — but it’s the exact kind of strange energy that keeps indie horror alive.