Returning to their family's house, members of an estranged family reunite to deal with their ailing patriarch's proclamation about his impending death and that he needs to be alive come sunrise to see their inheritance through, forcing them to solve a brutal mystery to get what they want.
This was a decidedly lackluster genre effort. The main thing that works here is the shockingly impressive visuals that run rampant inside the mansion which has some rather creepy visuals and concepts at points. The setup of the house and the overall Gothic-style layout of the location make for a great time here, getting a chance to see the way they get trapped inside and forced to undergo the series of confrontations involving the spirit coming to the forefront to fulfill its curse puts everything together rather nicely. This sets up the series of encounters throughout the house as they get slowly knocked off in some solid and somewhat suspenseful stalking scenes throughout the mansion as it manages to bring about some rather fun moments and graphic kills in the frantic finale offsetting the slow beginning. These manage to give the film a lot to like even there are some pretty big flaws holding this one back. Among the main drawbacks present here are the generally detestable characters that we're supposed to follow and hope they get what they want. The fact that they're presented as this typical crop of uber-wealthy, ill-mannered, self-centered elitist pricks who are far more concerned with dealing with their part of the inheritance scheme than trying to deal with saving themselves or caring what happens to the others trapped inside, it becomes immensely hard to care about what's going on rather quickly in this one. With this one barely offering anything to make them likable the longer it goes on with them openly mocking a couple's attempts to stick together and putting them down for believing in anything beyond what their personal interests entail, there's little interest in who we're supposed to be following here. The other big overriding factor with this one that manages to hold it back is the seeming ease with which its plot becomes overly predictable and cliched. There's little deviation at all here when it starts to run through the core idea present with the high-society family trying to stay alive when they start to go missing inside the house and turn up dead later on. The influx of supernatural sequences that come about here are so brazenly expected and routine in storyline terms that it's not entirely shocking to know what's going to happen once the revelation gets brought up involving the source of the haunting and how that leads into one of the most overdone and underwhelming finales in the genre where it's so blatantly obvious what's going on that it's not in the slightest bit interesting due to this. There's enough here with these elements to bring this one down.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.
