If it weren't for the fact that it isn't the least bit scary, The Messengers would be one heck of a good horror movie.

It's beautifully shot, and artfully directed by twin-brother Hong Kong hotshots Danny and Oxide Pang. It's well acted by a cast of familiar faces who are more talented by several degrees than the interchangeable puppets who shriek and wisecrack their way through most modern-day horror films. And the visual effects are creepy and credible.

But when there's literally nothing in the scary stuff that we haven't seen before, all that care and attention to detail still amounts to being all dressed up with no place to go.

It begins in promising enough fashion with a prologue in which a family is terrorized and wiped out by a brutal unseen something in their rambling old farmhouse. So when a new family moves into the same house some time later, anybody who's seen The Amityville Horror (among many others) has a pretty good idea of what's about to come down.

In this case, it's about to come down on the Solomons, a nice bunch of folks from Chicago who have escaped to the North Dakota farmlands to make a fresh start and recover from a grievous mistake by daughter Jess (Kristen Stewart) that nearly tore the family apart.