Review in a Hurry: A family with a son dying of cancer moves into a creepy Victorian house in this bloodless, bland spookfest riddled with empty "gotcha!" moments.
The Bigger Picture: Lionsgate, better known for gorefests like Saw, goes soft with a more traditional, more so-so, PG-13 haunted-house flick. The cast is solid with Virginia Madsen as the strong mother, Martin Donovan as the lousy drunk father, Elias Koteas as the priest with all the answers and Veronica Mars alum Kyle Gallner as the terminally ill teen who might be channeling more than chemo side effects.
Like 99 percent of all ghost stories, this one's "based on a true story," and the real-life details are genuinely creepy. Hidden between the floorboards are numerous old-timey photographs of dead folks à la The Others. And Amityville may have looked more architecturally possessed, but this house-from-hell was once a funeral parlor (comes with a working cadaver table!), and the previous residents spawned a clairvoyant young man who died a horrible death.
So as the son spends hours alone in his twisted new crib, his mental and physical breakdown becomes more disturbing than any run-of-the-mill specter.
But alongside these genuinely unsettling moments are way too many Boo!-It's-just-the-cat scares that may annoy, rather than frighten, modern horror audiences. A character that goes down to a dark basement and then decides to make it his bedroom will already put the audience on edge. There's no need to throw in Japanese horror-like shadows in the background accompanied by a music score that screams, "Be scared now!"
The 180—a Second Opinion: If you're in the mood for this kind of stuff, you could do far worse. And we won't spoil the ending, but the last act stacks up nicely as a terrifying and overflowing climax.