The Messengers

(2007) **

The film opens with a scene of a Mother and kids packing hurriedly in their old farm house. Suddenly a malevolent force crashes into the room, and attacks the Mother. Boy runs away and catches up with sister. Then she gets attacked and the boy goes and hides in a cupboard. Naturally, he doesn't make it either.

Cut to Dylan McDermott and Penelope Ann Miller who have decided to move their family, daughter Jess and son Ben, out to the Middle of Nowhere, ND for a "fresh start." Apparently there was some trouble with teenager Jess back in the big city of Chicago so they all need to move out to a big abandoned haunted farm so that Dad can plant sunflowers. Of course, they don't know it's haunted...yet.

Eerie things start to happen....reeeeeeaaaallllyyy sssllloooooooowwwwllllly. And why is it that every horror movie that deals with the "supernatural" has to have some ghost moving in that herky-jerky way? Oh right, because The Ring, a really good horror flick, had that element. Well, guess what? It's not so scary now that every Tom, Dick and Oxide Pang Chun have used it.

So we get a couple of spooky moments - all of which I saw in the previews. The family is joined by drifter Burwell - John Corbett, how's that career going? And a lot of time is spent growing sunflowers and skirting around the issue of what happened in Chicago. We know that Jess has a suspended license - ooooo - and Ben the toddler doesn't talk. Ben is the only one who can see the ghosts however, so he spends a lot of time looking at the ceiling and pointing.

I spy with my little eye...

Things come to a head one night when Dad McDermott cuts his hand and Penelope Mom takes him to the hospital leaving the kids all alone. Suddenly things start breaking, lamps crash to the ground, the ghosts make a big mess kind of thing. Jess ends up at the basement door, Ben is at the other end of the hall and he sees Jess get dragged by a bunch of dead looking arms into the darkness of the basement. She fights her way out and is rescued out a window by John Corbett. When they look back into the house though, nothing is wrong. Scary. Or not. Naturally, no one buys Jess' story. "She's just having a hard time adjusting." Yeah, I would too if I was attacked by a bunch of ghosts. Pretty soon Jess starts to see them too and more crazy stuff goes on. We see more of herky-jerky ghost boy. Ben points some more. Jess tries to get her parents to leave the house but they can't believe anything she says because she's untrustworthy! (We finally find out she picked up the kid brother when she had a buzz on and crashed the car. Subsequently Ben stopped talking.)

Basically nothing really happens in the movie until the last 20 minutes. It must have been about that time that somebody figured out this was supposed to be a horror movie, not a character study. And then the big "reveal" comes and it is stoooopid. And predictable. Ghosts get their revenge and everyone lives happily ever after in their fields of sunflowers.