Dec 25, 2011
Take one haunted house, three insomniacs, and one psychiatrist, mix them up in one experiment in fear gone bad, then add in a bunch of CGI ghosts to taste and bake for just under 2 hours-what do you get? One disappointing movie with no surprises, lack luster performances, and dumb looking ghosts in a really cool looking house.
Liam Neeson (Gun Shy, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Rob Roy, Schindler’s List) stars in this sad attempt at horror. He plays Dr. David Marrow, a psychiatrist running a controversial experiment to study fear. He recruits a group of insomniacs under false pretenses and sticks them in a huge castle-like haunted house to see if they get scared, only to find that the house is really haunted. The story actually turns out to be okay; it has some decent plot points that drag the story forward and it actually does a pretty good job of grabbing your interest from the start and pulling you in to the movie. But once the CGI ghosts show up, it pretty much falls flat on its face from that point on. Catherine Zeta-Jones (Entrapment, The Mask of Zorro, The Phantom) running around scared in sexy outfits can’t even help at this point.
To be honest though, the movie makes for an okay video rental for when you are home sick from work and don’t want to watch the daytime soaps. They did a pretty good job on the house and its back-story. That alone, does manage to keep the movie in the two stars (just okay) range.