I’m mad at myself for not figuring out the twist ending.

Up until that point, The Uninvited is an average, lazy horror movie: cheap scares, stupid plot points, real by-the-numbers stuff. I was slowly developing a relaxed hatred of it, but then the ending came along, I realized I had missed the obvious clues, and I actually slapped my forehead: duh.

So congratulations, The Uninvited: you got me.

Except…don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. For one thing, you’re yet another remake of a Japanese horror movie, 2003′s A Tale of Two Sisters. And that movie basically ripped off its plot twist from an American movie. A handful of American movies, actually. It had already become a cliché, then A Tale of Two Sisters stole it, and now you, The Uninvited, stole it back again. Congratulations.

I hate reviewing movies with twist endings, because the ending is usually the only reason the movie exists, and yet I can’t talk about it as much as I want without giving it away. But I would like to add that after I got over the forehead-slapping, if you look closer, it doesn’t make sense for lots of reasons. A lot of stuff that you see throughout the movie, you realize, couldn’t have actually happened the way they were presented. And yet some of that stuff had to have happened, or later parts of the movie wouldn’t make sense. They didn’t think it all the way through. Again: it’s lazy.

The story kicks off when teenaged Anna (Emily Browning) is released from a stay at a mental hospital. Last year, her family’s boat house on their big lakefront property had burst into flames — with her sick mother inside — and Anna had subsequently attempted suicide.

Things don’t look like they’ve gotten any better when she gets home. Her mother’s old live-in nurse Rachael (Elizabeth Banks) never left: she’s now moved in with Anna’s father (David Strathairn) — “helping him quote, three times a night,” according to Anna’s sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel).

Rachael’s creepy, in an icy and obviously evil kind of way. This is only confirmed to Anna when she starts getting visions of typical Horror Movie Scary Things — garbage bags with something rustling inside, a pale undead child climbing out from under the stove — and some quick research convinces her and Alex that she’s being warned that Rachael isn’t who she says she is. It’s up to the two sisters to stop her.

Like I said, this is all done in a very familiar fashion to anyone who’s seen a horror movie in the past few years, and the scares feel arbitrary. They use an obvious thematic device — every time Anna’s about to experience something scary, you hear a bell ringing — which might