Uninvited, The (Blu-ray)

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"There's something evil in the house."

Yeah, and something is rotten in the state of Denmark that even Blu-ray high definition can't help.

According to IMDb, there are currently twelve different movies with the title "The Uninvited," including one of my favorite ghost stories, 1944's "The Uninvited" with Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey. But this 2009 title is unrelated to any of them. Instead, screenwriters Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro, and Carlo Bernard adapted their script from the popular 2003 South Korean horror film "Changhwa, Hongryon," written and directed by Kim Jee-Woon. I assume the South Korean effort was better than this one because there's nothing new here.

Sixteen-year-old Anna Ivers' mother, who was very sick during the last years of her life, died in a fire ten months earlier. After witnessing the event, Anna (Emily Browning) tried to commit suicide, and her father, Steven (David Strathairn), sent her to a mental hospital to recover. At the time of the story, Anna has come home, and she wants to forget all the bad dreams.

But it ain't gonna happen. She's no sooner home than worse stuff befalls her. She finds that her dad has taken up with the mother's former nurse, a beautiful young woman (emphasis on the "young") named Rachael (Elizabeth Banks); and Anna's older sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), tells Anna the couple depress her with their constant lovemaking. The father, a writer (and apparently a successful one judging by their elaborate shoreline house in Maine), is an insensitive, inconsiderate oaf. Anna's boyfriend, Matt (Jess Moss), has some mysterious information he wants desperately to convey to her. And it looks as though something may be haunting the old homestead. Just your ordinary horror-movie day in the country.

Doors go creaking and squeaking by themselves. Anna hears her mother's wrist bell, the one she used to call people for help, ringing in the night. And dark entities lurk in the shadows. If there's an Asian horror-movie remake cliché the filmmakers, Charles and Thomas Guard and their screenwriters, overlooked, I don't know what it is. There's even the usual wind, rain, and thunder accompanying any spookiness that comes along.

Is Anna hallucinating? Is she crazy? Is someone or something really haunting the house? Do we care?

"The Uninvited" moves along at the speed of a desert cactus growing, and its ground is just as arid and barren. Even Christopher Young's background music sounds familiar. It shouldn't surprise us as he also wrote the music for "The Grudge," "Ghost Rider," and "Spider-Man 3," yet his music here actually sounds more like "Pan's Labyrinth." Now, what do you mean, Are there any creepy little kids around? Of course, there are. It wouldn't be an Asian horror-movie remake without creepy little kids hanging around. Indeed, they play an integral part in the story. Along with the dripping water and the pools of blood.

By halfway through the film, the plot takes several turns that make no logical sense, and all the characters start behaving irrationally. It turns out that everything is leading up to a "surprise" ending that is anything but a surprise. I mean, when a movie has to depend on a shocking finish for its only real impact, it sort of makes the rest of the film seem meaningless. Besides, M. Night Shyamalan already covered this territory, and he ran out of steam ages ago.

Not that a viewer won't find some small pleasure in "The Uninvited." The location shooting in British Columbia looks great (quick: name a recent picture not filmed in Canada), and the movie's four leads are appealing. Emily Browning as the main character is charmingly innocent and naive. Arielle Kebbel as the seventeen-year-old sister has a lot less to do than Ms. Browning, but she looks good in a bikini. Elizabeth Banks as the dad's new girlfriend is appropriately threatening. It's David Strathairn that gives one pause. He does fine in the part, but he's an Oscar-caliber actor, and the role of the one-dimensional, philandering father seems beneath him.