TWIN BROTHERS from Hong Kong, Danny and Oxide Pang demonstrated a flair for the horror genre in Bangkok Dangerous and The Eye, but that appears to have been lost in transition to the US for their first English-language movie.
The setting is a remote North Dakota farm, where the dysfunctional Solomon family have moved from Chicago for reasons hinted at along the way and eventually explained in a distinctly underwhelming revelation.
Dad (Dylan McDermott) plans to grow a field of sunflowers, while Mom (Penelope Ann Miller) has an edgy relationship with their teen daughter (Kristen Stewart), and their young son (played by twins Evan and Theodore Turner) remains strangely silent. John Corbett (from Sex and the City) turns up as a supposedly enigmatic drifter who helps out on the farm.
It goes without saying that the rundown house is haunted. A black-and-white prologue, the only effective sequence in the movie, illustrates the horrible fate of the former occupants. The attempted shocks that follow are pathetically feeble and delivered with sledgehammer subtlety.
With dollops from other movies - The Birds, The Amityville Horror, The Sixth Sense, Dark Water - tossed into the pot, an abbreviated version of the title would be more appropriate: The Mess.
