It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but I’m glad I saw it on half price Tuesdays.

The biggest problem this movie had was it’s predictability. Almost every seen you knew what was going to happen, to such a degree you could almost even predict the dialog. People talk about movies they see being formulaic and this one really looks like someone had a checklist that read “scenes to be put in exorcism movies”. I saw so many scenes that were lifted from other movies, towards the end I started openly laughing at them. Would be a good trivia game for Halloween, watch the movie with friends and everyone writes a list of stolen scenes, and whoever finds the most wins, or you could turn it into a drinking game I suppose.

The second problem. For a horror/suspense movie, it just wasn’t very scary. You could see the film makers tried to build the atmosphere, but the tension scenes were few and far between, and There were too many things that didn’t make sense when I dirst watched it. If the spirit is trapped in the box, why didn’t it wan’t the box destroyed so it could not be shoved back in? If the spirit is so powerfull it can toss people around like they were nothing, why then, when it is being excersised, all it does is kick and scream? I could easily make up some answers if we wanted to argue about it but I shouldn’t have had to do it myself, they movie should have spent more time explaing the mythology of the demon, and less on the main characters relationships with his ex wife, his daughters, his job. Or maybe the marketing was bad, this was really supposed to be a drama, and It was my fault for thinking this was a horror.

I like Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgewick, but I don’t think I’ll be watching this one again. If I feel like watching a movie about someone who’s been possessed, there are a lot better choices, like the obvious ones of The Exorcist or The Amityville Horror. There’s also the excellent, yet underrated The Prophecy, or even The Fallen which, while much of it was boring, had an awesome scene in the middle (if you watch it, you’ll know whatnI mean, I don’t want to spoil it) and and ending twist that totally redeemed the movie and was better than anything M. Night has come up with since The Sixth Sense.