The Messengers (2007)

	Directed by: Oxide Pang Chun Danny Pang	COUNTRY USA GENRE Horror/Drama NORWEGIAN TITLE The Messengers RUNNING TIME 90 minutes
	Produced by: Sam Raimi William Sherak Jason Shuman Rob Tapert
	Written by: Mark Wheaton Todd Farmer

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Jess	Kristen Stewart	½
Roy	Dylan McDermott	½
Denise	Penelope Ann Miller	½
Burwell	John Corbett
Ben	Evan Turner Theodore Turner	½
Colby Price	William B. Davis

Review

At the outset,The Messengers is quite a useful family drama with fine performances, especially from the ever-reliable Dylan McDermott and the very promising Kristen Stewart, who with this lead and a solid turn in Into the Wild has made something of a breakthrough this year. It's a pleasant surprise to see how well the directors handle the interpersonal material, bearing in mind that this is ostensibly a horror movie. The result is that we dread the moment they are going to pour clichéd horror omens over us. And predictably, there are sadly few original ideas in the depiction of the film's horror elements. They are insipid, to say the least, and anyone with only modest experience with the genre will likely doze off during the supernatural segments – only to be abruptly awakened by the filmmakers' desperate use of shrieking sounds to keep us on the edge of our seats, of course. Towards the end, it becomes clear that the story retains some credibility on a psychological level, but this cannot salvage the utterly uncreative artistic execution up until then. Had The Messengers been a film about a family tormented by their own history instead of ghosts, it probably could have been a good movie.