I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sorry for Roy Solomon (Dylan McDermott), the well-meaning, down-on-his-luck father in The Messengers, the first Hollywood offering from Asian horror sensations the Pang brothers. Him and his urban kin have had a rather rough go at it lately (though for a long time we’re not quite certain why that is, or why we should even care), and he only wants to start fresh, relocating to a run-down “fixer up’er” in the middle of God’s country to try his hand at farming America’s last great crop: sunflower seeds. Yet Roy and I have some disturbingly different ideas on what kind of home qualifies as a “fixer up’er”. To me that term would cover anything with ample amounts of cracked paint, leaky plumbing, and maybe an annoying bug infestation or two. He, on the other hand, expands the defintion to include all manner of dilapidated hell-holes that look like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only minus the bone room and meat hooks. Of course, it wouldn’t be a formulaic haunted house movie without the unwitting family moving blithely into a home obviously inhabited by a great evil with no regard for proper maintenance. And a formulaic haunted house movie is exactly what the Pang brothers have set out to create.

The Messengers starts off strongly enough with a black and white flashback detailing the horrific events that led this once stately manor down the road to ruin. The opening images whip by, as we hang on every lightning quick cut to catch sight of a monster always kept ever so slightly out of view. It’s an attention grabbing taste of what you’d expect from a pair of directors ready to make their mark in Hollywood after achieving hometown acclaim with 2002’s The Eye. But it’s over before we know it, and we’re soon launched into present day to ride shotgun with the dull-as-dishwater Solomon brood on their car ride into misery.

It isn’t long before the film shifts from bad to worse, as the horror movie cliches are laid on hard and fast. From the two children (teenage Jess, and her mute brother Ben) whom are cursed with the ability to see phenomenon unknown to their parents, to the ominous flock of crows who spend their time either casting murderous silhouettes across every inch of the sky, or outright attacking anyone who dares tread below, we’ve seen all of these ideas before, and very often in better movies. But as capably as the Pangs crib notes from the likes of The Sixth Sense and The Amityville Horror, they are seemingly completely unaware of how to recreate any of the tension and suspense that made those films famous. Jump scares and false alarms come in abundance, and the screenplay is littered with moments that involve grey skinned ghosts spastically scuttling from room to room, but all quickly fall victim to the law of diminishing returns. While it’s certain the Pangs aren’t lacking in style and cinematic flair, they have a serious problem with setting limits. This is most notably apparent in an excrutiatingly drawn out scene played from the opposing perspectives of Jess and Ben, as we watch the little boy quietly observe a ghost sneaking up behind his oblivious sister. Clearly meant to be one of the movie’s dramatic highpoints, it instead drags on to almost comical effect, feeling less like a fright and more like an overly long series of shots involving foreheads and finger pointing.

And the story certainly doesn’t fare any better, and is in fact practically non-existent. You’d think a script operating on an airtight running time of just under 90 minutes would make quick work of the kind of character building and background exploration we’d need to feel attached to this family, but screenplay writer Mark Wheaton apparently disagrees. We’re certainly made aware that Jess is an outcast in her own home, and that her pissed off and fed up mother (just barely brought to life by an incredibly wooden performance from Penelope Ann Miller) wants nothing to do with her, but we spend far too much of the movie wondering why. By the time they decide to enlighten us, just shortly before they introduce one of the most ridiculous plot twists imaginable, we’re far beyond giving a damn.

Despite the fact I wasn’t blown away by The Eye, I had decently high expectations for what Danny and Oxide Pang could accomplish with a Hollywood-size budget. Sadly, what should’ve been a refreshing dose of Asian-style horror ended up instead falling victim to every genre convention in the book. And banality aside, there’s something seriously wrong with a horror movie when the scariest idea it puts forth is a father willing to take in a shotgun wielding drifter mere minutes after meeting him.