A family’s venture into their own household paradise unlocks a room of demons known as “The Disappointments Room”. Hoping to repair their failing marriage, Dana (Kate Beckinsale) and Dave (Mel Raido) move, with their son Lucas (Duncan Joiner), into a dilapidated countryside manor near an aging Eastern seaboard town. In the course of renovating their new home, Dana discovers a small locked door in the corner of the attic that hadn’t appeared in the house’s blueprints. Intrigued by what’s beyond the unorthodox designed door, Dana is pushed by the apparition of one of the house’s previous guests. The ghost of a young girl named Laura (Ella Jones) appears and beckons her to open the door. But the spirits of those who protect the room’s terrifying secret return to make sure that the room remains closed forever. “The Disappointments Room” is written by D.J Caruso and Wentworth Miller, and is directed by the former. It is rated R for violent content, bloody imagery, some sexuality and adult language.

“The Disappointments Room” is a lazy, lackluster offering that has barely any redeeming qualities among itself as a horror movie. Considering this is a movie that is getting a big screen release, there are going to be a lot of angry moviegoers this weekend, for the few who decide that the trailer intrigued them enough to give it a shot. Whoever designed that trailer deserves an award for manipulative editing, as this movie is void of any kind of excitment or stimulation for the audience that sits through 91 minutes of bone dry material. Perhaps its most overbearing quality is that this movie serves as a checklist for what cheap horror films in 2016 currently encapsulate, and I never got tired of counting the cliches. Scary house of secrets? CHECK, Tortured family looking to move away for a fresh start? CHECK, pointless jump scares? CHECK, Confusing, ridiculous ending that makes absolutely no sense? CHECK CHECK CHECK. Considering this film had a 0% critical score and 22% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes before I saw the movie, I knew I was in for a treat. And perhaps that is the only thing that doesn’t disappoint about this movie. It is truly the worst horror film of 2016, and lacks any real clarity as to how this thing got made with a 15 million dollar budget. WHERE DID IT ALL GO? Seriously.

First of all is the wonderful characters that fill the script of such a movie. Led by the great Kate Beckinsale, whose performance is the soul positive for the movie. While I hated her character just the same as I did everyone else in the movie, I can say that Beckinsale gives her all for this movie, and should be commended on making the most out of a career-killing situation. In her role as Dana, we see a woman on the brink of madness after everything in her life seems to be resting on her strength and dominance over the household. If you commend Dana for her leadership, you equally detest her husband Dave for his decision to be the laziest on-screen spouse that I have ever seen. In Raido’s performance, we don’t get a lot of praise-worthy moments, and a lot of that is more on a script that doesn’t paint him in the most positive of lights. Midway through the movie, the film gets wise to the fact that this character is one of the two most important characters in this story, so it eliminates him in another cliche horror method of leaving town for work for a few days, in favor of introducing the audience to Lucas Till’s character. And this guy is truly a piece of work. In the method of establishing a new character worse than the previous one, Till’s Ben is raging pervert or horn-ball emotions. He’s only in a couple of scenes, but you always wait for the other shoe to fall any time he starts to feel like an intelligent character. This trio is who you’re stuck with for 91 minutes, so be ready to detest.

Now onto the material. By the end of the film, I felt very much like I was being presented two films. One a psychological thriller and the other one a ghost story. With the direction into horror, the movie abandons any shell of a decent scare or menace of threat within the house, because a lot of the scares early on are just dream or fantasy sequences. This is another in the list of popular horror tropes, and God does this movie overuse this idea. By the time the fourth or fifth hallucination happened, I started questioning to myself whether this movie was going to turn a corner and present some REAL terror before our eyes, or if the screenplay was as flacid as its characters. It turns out the answer was closer to the second option. The whole film feels like un-connected scenes that never really merge to make one cohesive script. There’s clearly a first and third act to the movie, but nothing really in between. The ending is a frustrating twist on everything we have learned to this point. I’m not even sure that it qualifies as a plot twist considering 1) It’s noticeable from a mile away, and 2) it abandons the logic of this supernatural entity that has haunted these characters up to this point.

The very idea of a disappointments room comes and goes in the movie without presenting any kind of scary or haunting visuals for the audience to soak in. More than anything, this room feels like a subplot in a movie that it was named after, and that is perhaps the biggest glaring negative for the movie’s creativity. Very little time or narrative is donated to its presence, so the important aspect feels more like a flimsy haunting backstory of these character’s past, and the room of something totally unrelated just happens to be there. The film attempts to base a history on the house’s former occupants, but the problem here feels more that our human protagonists are haunting them on THEIR land instead of vice versa. SPOILER WARNING – Nothing would ever happen in this story if Dana didn’t unlock the door which was so cautiously blocked off by someone else. This story happens because of the stupidity of our characters, and that stupidity doesn’t feel any more reduced by the end of the movie because no one is changed for the better. Do you know how there’s always that instance in the end of every movie where you feel that this family will be better now that they’ve confronted their demons and won? Yeah, it’s not in this movie. These people are every bit as hollow as they were when the 50 seconds of studio cards opened the movie for us.

“The Disappointments Room” is a litany of embarrassingly flawed aspects that was better left on the development shelf that it stayed on for three years. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back in Relativity Studios going under, and that alone should communicate that some cheap horror films simply do not deserve your money. In a stroke of life imitating art, the only disappointments room that I endured was the one that I saw this derivative failure on, and I feel like the movie itself can’t relate to that kind of horror.

2/10