The Apparition

This horror movie from Warner Bros. is nothing special, but it's nice to see a modest genre entertainment buoyed by a major studio's resources.

The entity is a ghostly presence amid an even ghostlier absence. This is truly distressed real estate.

Something lacking either body heat or visceral suspense.

For casual viewers desiring a few scares, some suspense and a sustained sense of dread and malevolence, you could do worse.

Lights flicker; soap and cactuses blacken; claw marks appear; icky molds gather like hornet nests.

Might give you a restless night, but only because you fell asleep in the theater.

Devoid of scares and energy, the picture is all bumps in the night and has nothing to set it apart from its other forgettable post-Japanese horror contemporaries.

In so many ways a missed opportunity, The Apparition looked like it could conjure a few scares in telling the story of a couple haunted by an entity they helped release, but this Ashley Greene vehicle fades into the void with a yawn.

None of this matters at all because the main characters are completely unlikable, and the momentum is consistently ruined by poor decision-making.

It's frightening to think that a major studio like Warner Brothers would not only release a film this bad into theaters nationwide, but that it would even green light it in the first place.

Dull, dreary, pointless and bad, sporting shock scenes that don't shock, a grisly premise that doesn't make sense, and a meager cast of mostly uninterested-looking Hollywood lookers.

From start to finish, the movie basks in horrible horror clichés that will leave viewers straining to find something original in the proceedings.