Neither serious nor hilarious, neither excellent nor awful.

Rating: 2/10 (15 April 2011)

The trailers for this film did a good job in building it up to be a legitimate entry amongst the best horror efforts of the 00's. Even the DVD sleeve alone raised my expectations, and I almost found myself believing the perhaps over-zealous tag-line courtesy of Zoo; "the scariest movie of the decade". Unfortunately though, the writer of the aforementioned magazine's review, Charlie Parrish, apparently was either trying to pull a fast one on us, or has a critically low fear threshold.
I'm not going to say that it was terrible; it wasn't. There were plenty of well-executed shocks and I was kept watching until the end. It had the ingredients for a good horror film. Perhaps they just weren't mixed together in the right amounts.
My main problem was the attempt at genre definition. The trailers, the adverts, all the publicity, built it up to be purely horror; scares and jumps galore. However, the comedic aspects when watching the film itself led me to believe that perhaps it should have been described as a comedy-horror, or even just made its mind up from the two. In fact, it's so laden with clichés that, if it had been intended as such, it would have gained a higher rating from me. I simply didn't know whether or not to take it seriously.
Some of the shocks took me by surprise; good horror in that respect. Some of the gruesome bodily-fluid-related surprises made me laugh; good comedy in that respect. The balance just wasn't right, though. I don't agree with the one-star reviews that label the film as boring, dry, terrible... there are definitely traces of good film in there. I certainly don't agree with the ten-star reviews however, labelling it as a return to "classic horror", unless your idea of "classic horror" is mediocre acting and downright daft portrayals of possession (i.e. a man experiencing catatonia during a séance, which looks more like some sort of bizarre dad-at-a-wedding type of dance).
If you begin to watch this expecting a frightening watching experience, you'll be disappointed, probably. If you watch it expecting to draw some laughs out of it, you'll probably enjoy it more.