Failure to suspend disbelief.

Rating: 3/10 (12 October 2012)

I was not able to get in to this movie. I'm a sucker for scary movies, and although this one did make me jump a few times the fear factor in this film is fully from the sense of surprise, not actual 'fear' itself. Every time I found myself starting to get involved in the movie, it would pull me back out by a lack of continuity and complete predictability. The story is overplayed, most of the elements in this film we have seen over and over and over again. You can tell within the first 10 minutes what is going to happen, and then you just sit there and wait for it to unfold. An hour and a half later when it does unfold, the movie comes to a sudden end, and you are left disappointed - all that waiting and then nothing really happens. Such an overplayed premise - the film opens with the family moving into a house where someone had been killed in the past - there's a shocker. Of course one of the kids has some weird oddity that picks up on the vibes instantly. The husband is a writer (why do writers in films always have such a shitty sense of style?) the wife is.. who knows.. she's just there to add more tension to the situation. Husband finds some film that documents the crime he is writing about, that occurred in the house.. ooh gee how did it get there? who knows.. what a mystery - sooo scary, we've never seen anything like that happen before. He watches the video and it documents the crime, as well as others - he watches it and finally notices a character and a symbol that repeats in each video. He talks to some college professor (wow something else we've never seen before - though the 'professor' was probably the most interesting character in the entire movie) who lets him know it's some old ancient god that of course doesn't exist, and how it is some initiation.. meanwhile in every video one person from each family isn't present - an overly-obvious foreshadowing of who committed the actual crimes (the children themselves) ..now of course when he watched the video it released the spirit of this demon god whatever, the movie then just shows an hour straight of them having random situations where the spirit of this ghost or of the kids interfere - randomly popping up giving us a little startle but after the first 2 minutes of this it becomes obvious what is going to happen next in just about every scene.. When they finally let the story play out of course it gets to be too much and they all run back to their old home town - and conveniently as soon as they get there they discover that every family who has been killed, lived at the house of a previous murder - this part is I guess a "unique twist" but now what you knew was going to happen is confirmed, the youngest daughter kills the family then gets sucked into the movie reel which gets left in a box for the next family to find..
One of the things that really 'scare me' about scary movies is when it is something that could happen to any one in any situation - I left this movie knowing no one had ever been murdered in my house, and with no fear of ever running across this random demon in my real life, I didn't take the movie with me, which is usually when the scariness factor of a movie really kicks in. Although the story itself was semi-unique in the overall premise, the elements within it were recycled and way too common, making it very predictable. Between this and the errors in continuity I could never really get drawn into it for more than a few minutes, and any sense of fear that existed from the film, stayed in the theater with it.