There’s a substantial twist in “The Uninvited,” a pretty fair and reasonably scary remake of South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon’s thriller “A Tale of Two Sisters.” The twist was there in the stylish original, which I watched after the English-language re-do. If one of my film critic colleagues hadn’t guessed the twist out loud, and correctly, I might very well have been taken in by it. But you know? I’ll never know.

The Guard Brothers directed “The Uninvited.” They are Thomas and Charles, and they are British, and while much of their work here stays in strict stylistic line with the 2003 original, they supply jolts efficiently. Any idiot can frighten an audience with a “boo!” moment—the heroine turning suddenly, only to be startled by some innocent character, for example. Almost any idiot can direct a sequence involving the slow approach to a creepy, concealing object, out of which something will spring, or ooze or fly. But the quality of the surprise after the suspense, that’s what separates the hacks from the talent. The Guard Brothers cut fast and rarely steer clear of cliche, but they have a knack. Continue reading

Like turning fresh cod into fishsticks, the Hollywood machine has processed the 2003 South Korean horror film A Tale Of Two Sisters into The Uninvited, essentially remaking it as The Sixth Sense. Gone is the original film’s ambiguous, psychosexual bent; it’s replaced by unsettled ghosts dropping by to parse out information in the spookiest way possible. As with most PG-13-rated horror, it’s a slick, bloodless affair that’s neither as suggestive as the classic general-audiences ghost stories of the past, nor as intense as a hard-R would allow it to be. The result is a middling Frankenstein-like hybrid of spectral mayhem and murder mystery, constructed entirely out of borrowed parts. Continue reading