The Uninvited

Reviewed by:
Jordan Burchette

Directed by: Charles Guard, Thomas Guard

The Skinny: A teenage girl's (Emily Browning) repressed memories of her bedridden mother's gruesome death combine with the threat posed by mom's unwelcome replacement—and former nurse (Elizabeth Banks)—to form a movie that's not quite a thriller and not quite horror, but, man, is it noisy!

The Good: Fans of startlefests like The Strangers, The Grudge... The Anything, really, will get their money's worth in cheap sound FX scares. And the many red herrings intended to throw viewers off the climax's scent ultimately yield a twist ending that'll come as either a complete surprise or a wholesale invalidation of the last hour and a half of your life. (Guess which category we fell into.)

The Bad: We come from the old cinematic school that demands things happen in a movie. Any things. Even boring things. But no things happen during the middle 90 percent of this movie, making it the half-ass Chinatown backrub you must endure to get to the ending's full release.

Kebbel's Bits: Despite the filmmakers' wanton marmification of Elizabeth Banks, you still have the perpetually bikini'd Arielle Kebbel on whom to bestow glares creepier than the rest of this movie.

Theater, DVD, or TNT in Five Years? If you're trying to dislodge undigested meats from an impacted colon, the big screen's the way to go. Otherwise, if you never see this movie ever in your life, that's OK, too.

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