The Uninvited: Critic Reviews

Horror standbys like mangled corpses and stone-faced children pop up regularly, but sibling directors Charles and Thomas Guard haven't quite nailed the genre's rhythms.

It rummages around in familiar domestic genres looking for a reason to exist.

They are all just guests at a camp masked ball - poised to unveil themselves in a denouement that somehow manages to be more outlandish - and more comic - than all the bumps and rattles that went before.

Though not in the top tier of psychological horror flicks, The Uninvited is well-paced and offers enough jolts and twists to keep an audience sufficiently on the edge of their seats to offset the price of admission.

Experienced horror fans will probably stay one step ahead of the game, but it's still a nice ride.

The Uninvited is a mess of styles and stolen ideas, including a plot twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan roll his eyes and dialogue straight from a CW scene generator.

What can I tell you about The Uninvited that you haven't already heard about every other instantly forgettable horror flick?

The plot borrows as freely from Hitchcock and Henry James as from the Bard of Avon, and doesn't make scrupulous sense, though I'd have to see the film again, which I won't do, to make sure it doesn't cheat.

When a movie like this is done well, it's uncommon. The Uninvited is done well.

There's a substantial twist in The Uninvited, a pretty fair and reasonably scary remake of South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon's thriller A Tale of Two Sisters.

A teenager's resistance to her father's new girlfriend provides the emotional underpinnings for The Uninvited, a spooky, if narcotic, psychological thriller adapted from a 2003 K-horror suspenser.

Cheap thrills and a gimmicky twist at the climax keep The Uninvited in the realm of the subpar horror movie.

By the end of the film, The Uninvited is genuinely compelling. But despite the scares along the way, the rest of the film doesn't make an especially compelling case for doing the work to get there.

Weak even by the standard of uninspired recent Asian-horror remakes.

The story line is more crafted than it at first appears, but a big finish doesn't always make up for everything that came before. Until then, The Uninvited is basically 80 minutes of things jumping out and making loud noises.

The premise is seaworthy, but the execution flounders.

A horror-thriller that's neither horrifying nor thrilling.

The Uninvited is a flawed production, but gratifying in the way it delivers.

In truth it's just a gimmicky thriller that doesn't play fair with the audience.

The movie's source material invited a much more thoughtful interpretation.

Take a 'concept', strip it bare of all layers of meaning, remake it with added genre cliches and scantily clad American teens in order to a 'wider audience'. Voila.

[Almost fresh, but] in the end, Uninvited has more in common with The Devil's Rain than it does Rosemary's Baby.

As far as PG-13 Americanizations of Asian shockers go, it's about 70 percent passable