The Uninvited

The Pitch: When a teen girl sees her invalid mother die in a grisly house explosion, the trauma lands her 10 months of institutionalized therapy. Upon returning, she uneasily finds that her mom's nurse has become the household's replacement matriarch. What follows is a series of seemingly unrelated ghost warnings, shrill noises and ominous Elizabeth Banks facial expressions that set the plot on one course, only to derail it upon climax.

The High Points: The end. That's not sarcasm; the climax is the only thing for which the rest of this flick exists, and if its outcome doesn't make the lengthy list of possible payoffs that the first hour and 15 minutes afford you time to contemplate while nothing's happening, you'll be genuinely surprised.

The Low Points: See: The High Points. Occasionally interspersing the inactivity of the film's front 17 is the kind of cheap foley horror that marks most of today's movie boos: cymbal-crashing fits, metal-scraping starts and raspy-throated dead kids. Kudos to DreamWorks for screening it, though; most horror movies these days, anticipating the response, don't even offer press access before opening weekend anymore.

Interesting, We Guess: Like many of its definite-articled contemporaries (The Ring, The Grudge, The Eye), The Uninvited has an Asian antecedent, having been adapted from the 2003 Korean production A Tale of Two Sisters, the country's highest-grossing horror flick to date.

Simple Synopsis (SPOILER ALERT): Imagine great movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Sixth Sense and Fight Club tossed and served by a 13-year-old in one of those processed chicken bowls from KFC. You'll have no memory of consuming it, but you'll never forget how it ends.