The Messengers

I had high hopes for this one based on the trailers and the directors (Hong Kong's Pang Brothers), but was again let down by a substandard story, plot and direction.

The movie starts off in glorious black and white with a young family being murdered in their home by an unseen assailant. Fast forward an unspecified amount of time to find a brand new family moving into the scene of the crime (a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota).

Almost immediately an amazing number of horror movie cliches start taking place inside the house...whispers, bangs, creaks, shadows flying by accompanied by a loud blast of music, and disembodied legs floating around the rooms and hallways. All of this is only visible to the kids in the family, one a troubled teen (played by Zathura's Kristen Stewart, about the only bright spot in this movie), and the other a mute toddler (we only find out VERY LATE in the movie why he doesn't talk). Of course the parents (Dylan Mcdermott, and Penelope Ann Miller) don't belive their daughter when she tries to explain what is going on (again, we don't understand the distust of their kid till later in the movie)

In the meantime the family struggles to make their new house a home, and work on their sunflower farm with the help of a mysterious stranger, Sex And The City's John Corbett, but the spirits (and the crows....yes crows) have other ideas. We are then treated to a number of poorly hashed together horror set pieces (a couple in the cellar, one in the sunflower field, one in the barn, and a pretty good one with the kids in the house), before the whole thing comes neatly, a little too neatly, together.

The main problem with this movie is that it tries to be too many things in one. Imagine The Grudge, The Birds, and When A Stranger Calls, thrown into a pot and mixed together...this would be the gruel it produces. The unfortunate thing is that the spirits in this one (what little we seen of them) were actually pretty convincing. Pallid, vein-riddled, milky eyed ghosts that could have been pretty scary given the proper setting and screen time, but in ther end they became almost secondary to the ridiculously overdone plot that we've now seen too many times (particulary in the J-horror flicks).

It's hard to tell if the Pang brothers just completely missed the boat on this, their first major US release, or if the studio interfered and watered this down to a PG-13 aiming, once again, for the coveted high school crowd. I watched this in a half-full theater which consisted mainly of their target audience, and the fact that I was more interested in the conversation going on behind me about the teenage girls most recent high-school crush, was a pretty good indication of how much this movie missed the mark.

1 out of 5 stars