When trying to browse the index.php page on brand new Grav install on IIS i only get a “http error 500” page

I am trying to use Grav on a Windows Server 2012 R2 with IIS. I unzip the grav core package and have moved it to my folder named grav in the following location: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\

When i try to launch the site i get the following message to come up:

This page isn't working localhost is currently unable to handle this request. http error 500

I have narrowed the issue down to the line $grav->process(); as the issue from the snippet below that exist in the index.php page.

// Process the page
try {
    $grav->process();
} catch (\Exception $e) {
    $grav->fireEvent('onFatalException', new Event(array('exception' => 
$e)));
    throw $e;
}

i am not sure what that line is doing or why it is failing. I can make additional pages and put php code into them and i can render the page without issues.

I am at a loss right now because i made sure all the php modules are enabled and php is installed. I also installed php for IIS and made sure i did the URL rewrite for the htaccess file to a web.config file per the instructions.