Upon my honor as a founding member of the League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen, I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Urm, I mean, I swear that I don't ask for these DVDs specifically to torture Jason with. I actually asked for this one because I planned on watching it. Of course, when it comes down to a choice between watching two seasons of the animated X-men series or curiosity about how Elizabeth Banks is gonna do in a mediocre looking j-horror remake...well...I mean, he saw it lying there. HE WAS ASKING FOR IT! And goddamn if the bitch didn't get it. Here's Jason's review. Blame him, not me.

Somewhere in the bowels of Los Angeles, there's an underground facility. The gaping maw of this factory is fed tons of living tissue imported in rickety boxes from all across the world. Pipes hiss and panels glow as fresh ideas are chewed up, reconstituted, and shat back out. They're polished and prettied with cheap makeup, making sure each one is not too unlike the one before it. After being shrink-wrapped and oxygen starved, a team of ghouls sings sweet songs about them and grins with their preternaturally gleaming teeth, cooing at us to buy these shiny droppings.

Welcome to Hollywood.

The Uninvited is the latest sleek, nondescript product. They stripped the bones of the wildly successful South Korean original, 'A Tale of Two Sisters', and spackled it with the same crap they use on every other American remake. The story focuses on Anna (Emily Browning), a troubled girl slogging through the aftermath of her mother's mysterious, prolonged death. She returns home from the institution and immediately locks horns with Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), her dad's new trophy wife. Rachel herself starts behaving as though hers is the Hand That Rocks the Cradle and this surrogate mother moves from gold digging viper to cheery predator.

Make no mistake, 'The Uninvited' is not what I would call a 'bad movie'. It sports a good cast in its four principal characters, involving them in a mildly interesting familial drama. The mystery that unravels is compelling and is decorated with a few unexpected scares. One particular moment will have you wincing and is nearly worth the price of admission alone. It's a shot that will stick in your craw, that's for damned sure. The cinematography paints these shocks with lush shadows, but it's the same color palette used by so many 'Invisibles' and 'Molly Hartleys'. It all looks like every other fright flick of the last 15 years.

Creepy children run across the set. Anna suffers from horrible hallucinations. She has an opening dream sequence that you see coming from a mile away. Her sanity is doubted, especially by adults. And the factory strips elements from so many other films, dumping them wholesale into the grinder. Aside from the tired sameness that so much of it exhibits, there are a few snares of poorly written dialog and slap-your-head-stupid character decisions that only serve to extend the story.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

-Alternate Ending - No new information or fresh perspective here. It's very similar to the original.

-Unlocking the Uninvited - A behind-the-scenes featurette that you've seen tagged onto hundreds of other DVDs. Why do they bother? I love reading between the lines on these, as I've mentioned before. Here we see the undertones of people acting like there's shame in making a horror film and that this is more than that. They're too good for horror and so is this film so it's not really a horror film I promise it's drama I promise!!!

Spare me.

-Deleted Scenes - Pointless and minor variations on what's already there in the film.

'The Uninvited' is passionless, PG13 horror. The main thing going for it, which I hesitate to mention, is a sucker-punch of an ending, one that the film itself didn't earn. Once that point is dropped into your lap, though, the whole damned affair doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. You realize pretty quickly that you've bought a mass produced hunk of plastic, one that you've bought at least 20 times before.

Click Here to Buy The Uninvited [Blu-ray]