Mirrors

This action-packed spine-tingler creeped me out enough to look over my shoulder in the mostly empty dark theater. I've also avoided looking directly in a mirror.

Loosely adapted from the South Korean horror hit Into the Mirror, Alexandre Aja's gory follow-up to the brutal Hills Have Eyes is actually a marked improvement over the plodding and confusing original.

Fans of 24 will still be pleased that this is essentially Jack Bauer defending us against terrorists... ghost terrorists. And who can't get behind that?

Despite its talented director and a few good jolts, Mirrors is a dumbed-down horror film only the most forgiving fans will love.

Mirrors -- with the exception of a couple of moments -- just isn't that scary or thrilling. Aja employs every cliché horror image there is, from a scared person alone in the dark to water overflowing.

Aja has style to burn, and he isn't afraid to go for gruesome, hard-R effects in an increasingly glossy PG-13 genre. But his pedal-to-the-metal intensity only serves to heighten the film's fundamental ridiculousness.

110 minutes of bloodletting and bad acting, all of it packaged in some very attractive horror wrap.

This flick sinks to using classic terror tactics -- the ghost in the mirror, the kid with the knife, the thing that’s there and then not -- but Aja never accomplishes anything cool or original with his reflective props.

Mirrors starts out with an attention-grabbing bit of ultra-graphic violence, then kills nothing more than time with uninteresting character business and mundane attempts at atmospheric horror.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, is this the worst horror film of them all? No, but it’s not far off.

Mirrors is so tiresomely predictable, what's really scary is that no one from the studio boss down to the guy who yells "cut" didn't suggest that Aja try to inject a little originality into this lame creeper.

Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul. Or maybe it's the underwritten stupidity of everyone involved that grates on the nerves.

A slab of shoddy, hollow rubbish that can't be bothered to concoct imaginative frights or even tenuous bonds between its supernatural terror and its characters' human drama.

Inane, dull and about as scary as a drippy bottle of Windex, Mirrors is a rip-off of The Shining that substitutes a deserted department store for Shining's hotel and a strung-out Kiefer Sutherland for strung-out Jack Nicholson.