Formulaic but enjoyable ghost story

Rating: 7/10 (22 November 2013)

Finding their long-abandoned nieces after years in the wild, a man and his girlfriend learn the ghostly guardian the girls invented to watch over them is a real spirit and must try to save themselves from the supernatural threat.
This turned out to be quite a nice if somewhat clichéd offering that has some rather decent moments to it. One of the main problems to go on here is the fact that the film makes no sense about what kind of woman the guardian really is. Some of the time, it appears as a regular, plain old ghost haunting the family and attacking them or just playing with the children, but there's other times where the figure is made out to be an otherworldly demon trying to access our world through the spreading-fungus-like holes in the wall that seem to be set-up in order to harvest souls around the house, which comes off nicely in giving us some scares but really has little purpose in explaining the story. As well, the film tends to meander in completely uninteresting scenarios, with the vindictive grandmother trying to get the girls under her custody and not trusting the couple to do so merely for her own good or the sentimentality of slowly winning over the younger, more feral sister with motherhood tactics she'd never prepared for before, which is a plausible intuition from the storyline but really comes off as tired and cliché from the continued usage of the tactic in other movies. Beyond that, the kid-friendly rating is a detriment in keeping all the potential deaths and violence almost always off-camera or shrouded in darkness to really keep us from seeing anything interesting, and the constant materializing of the ghost beyond the unknowing character for a scare gets old the third time it happens. However, there's some good things here, including the rather ominous way it builds up in intensity towards the ghost actually attacking with the games with the children, mistaking it for the girls or simply using the fungus-like holes in the walls to spread the fear, and with it being such a creepy-looking creature in it's own right generates some very chilling sequences in the later half when it's finally on the warpath after the family. These here really save it from the rather pedestrian and lackluster offering it could've been.
Rated PG-13: Mild Violence, Language and children-in-jeopardy.