text: Even with the low standards of a dedicated horror fan, I found this film to be beyond awful. It was a huge disappointment since it was featured as one of the eight Horrorfest films. I can only hope the other seven were better. I was actually embarrassed for the friends I was able to convince to see this, and these are the same friends I made watch the remake of The Wicker Man. It has every cliché in the book. In fact, it went out of its way to include them. Let's start with the characters. Instead of one young damsel in distress, we get three: the single, hot mom with two daughters a blossoming yet brainless teenager and a cute yet simultaneously creepy little girl that you just know is going to have 'special' skills including supernatural knowledge and the ability to communicate with the dead. The little girl is the same one that was in the remake of The Amityville Horror. She was a little annoying but not nearly as irritating Dakota Fanning.<br /><br />Overall, these characters seemed like escapees from a LifeTime movie. I thought perhaps horror movies had moved on from scenes where the female characters go to bed in full makeup and run around in the dark announcing their presence to anyone with ears, but not this one. I also find it inconceivable that none of them could be bothered to secure the front door from arbitrarily opening day and night. To give you an idea about how uninvolved I was with these characters, I spent most of my time thinking about how cold it must have been on the set because everyone was in a coat even in their houses and how white their teeth were.<br /><br />Despite all the formulaic plot machinations, the film does not build any suspense at all except to wonder when it will be over. There is more atmosphere at the local Giant in the middle of the most mundane of weekday afternoons. As for the dialogue, I could have sampled quotes from ten other films and cobbled together better, more believable discourse. The gore level, the eye candy for a horror fan, was minimal at best. Without their tiny weapons, the 'zombies' were not menacing at all. You could probably drop kick a couple of them across the room.<br /><br />What really kills it is its banality. Horror films, more than any other genre, cannot survive uninspired mediocrity. Give me a horror movie that is comically inept or outrageously over the top with gore. I can even take the new ones with their cringe inducing torture. Every once in a while I'd appreciate a truly frightening one, anything but this.