pure crap...stay away (some spoilers)

Agreed, pure crapola.

No suspense whatsoever throughout the whole film;

not scary in the least;

there wasn't anything that you haven't seen any hundreds of other horror films -- it's like they took all the parts of the modern-day horror film, put it into a giant mixer, and this is what came out the other end;

illogical decisions on the parts of the characters;

too much left unexplained -- because the entire film was poorly written;

The police officer was going to die. Saw it coming. The babysitter was going to die. Saw it coming. The girlfriend/co-worker was going to die. Saw it coming. The cat was going to die. Saw it coming (in fact, I object to the use of animals in horror films because you know that that's they're only purpose, to be killed. Can we please have some films where animals are not killed?)... I didn't see these characters' death's coming because I'm some sort of genius, but because I'm familiar with the horror film cliches that tell me these characters would die. I knew Kevin Costner's character and his character's daughter were going to die the moment the old guy told him that he set the fire that killed the other girl... Though for a moment at the end I was almost impressed because I thought that they were going to escape alive after all -- a feat which would've been quite different from the normal horror-film cliche. But no! Nevermind! Unfortunately, going with the point about it being poorly written, the writer didn't have enough imagination to end it otherwise. Which ties into...

they felt they had to give it that bleak "twist" at the end that all modern-day horror films think they have to have. No one can just let a horror film "end" nowadays. They always have some twist. How about a film with a real twist at the end? THERE IS NO TWIST! That would be different!

Oh yeah, and let's not forget the fact that anytime something happened, like a creature attacked, it happened off-camera! Even small-budgeted films manage to make a virtue about of how little they have to spend, but on this film the poor production value showed (unlike the explosion OFF-CAMERA at the end. Lame!).

Similarly, Kevin Costner runs back into the house and his girlfriend/co-worker is all bloody. The fact that they showed nothing leading up to this, just jumped ahead to the end result, made me feel like the whole thing was rushed. Well, that's not quite it... more like we the audience were cheated. We knew that something was going to happen to her, but rather than show that process, they skipped right from A to Z.

Just so you have something to gage my opinion by, I like horror films that are psychological and creepy, not gory. Some of my favorites in that category are The Mothman Prophecies, Zodiac (not a "horror" film, I know, but creepy and suspenseful as hell), and the Spanish film The Orphanage. I will not watch torture-porn like the Saw series, the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or any of that crap, which uses shock and extreme-gore in place of true suspense. Life's too short to watch such brain-deadening, nihilistic sh!t.

(Congratulations if you managed to make it through my entire, long-winded post!)