Starting with a family trip to the Grand Canyon we are introduced to the Taylor family. While exploring with his sister Stephanie (Lucy Fry) their autistic son Michael (David Mazouz) falls through the ground into a cave and discovers some mysterious stones and here starts the problems with this movie. Nobody comes to see where the autistic child is gone or even seems to realise he has gone missing and that’s just not normal.

We then cut to the families home life and Peter (Kevin Bacon) and his wife Bronny (Radha Mitchell) are shown to be struggling to keep things together. Peter has previously had an affair and Bronny is struggling as a former alcoholic also Stephanie is Bulimic so this is not a happy home and the family is already on the edge.

Then the typical horror movie clichés begin. Noises in the attic, moving chandeliers, shadows on the wall, constantly barking dog next door, the son speaking with a new invisible friend. The only sense of originality is the black hand marks that are appearing around the house that Michael gets blamed on. Despite all of this there is no real sense of dread as it’s all background noise to the main story of the family breakdown. The first sign that there may be something more serious amiss is when Michael seemingly sets fire to the wall in his room but of course this is only another step to the introduction of the native American spirits that are linked to the stones that Michael took from the cave.

It takes so long for the family to realise something is amiss that the movie is already nearly over by that stage and they feel so incompetent leaving the autistic kid constantly unsupervised that I’ve never hoped that a family gets possessed in a movie more than this.

Director Greg McLean burst onto the scene with the classic Wolf Creek but has flattered to deceive since and this movie feels like a rip off of so many others that to have actors of the quality of Bacon & Mitchell on board would suggest that somewhere along the line the script or even the movie itself was changed from the initial vision. It’s a ninety minute movie that feels twice as long, where nothing really happens, there are no real jump scares and there is no real sense of terror, it’s that bad. The only credit I can give is to Mazouz who’s efforts to play an autistic character is deserving of a mention in a movie where his character would have probably been better off if he had been taken away by the spirits in the first place.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10