Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Haven’t heard of this one, but if I see one more J-horror ghost in my lifetime, I will start making some goddamn ghosts of my own. Better you than me, Anton:

They Wait (2007, directed by Ernie Barbarash)

An attempt to do for J-horror demons what Ginger Snaps did for werewolves, They Wait is a muddled story about the immigrant experience in Canada and revenge from beyond the grave that manages to be far less than the sum of its parts.

Jaime King is a former journalist from Vancouver living in Shanghai with her Chinese-Canadian husband and son. When her husband's beloved uncle dies back in Canada, the family heads back for the funeral. It happens to be Hungry Ghost Month on the Chinese calendar, though, and she quickly discovers that both her and her son are sensitive to the presence of spirits and demons. When hubby has to fly back to China on business, it's up to her to unearth the skeletons (literal and figurative) in the family closet and save their son from the ghosts that have lain claim to him.

They Wait isn't completely terrible. King, for instance, proves to be a pretty decent actress, something Sin City never gave her a chance to demonstrate, while the supporting cast of familiar Chinese faces (such as Pei-Pei Chang, best known in the States as Jade Fox from Crouching Tiger) plus Michael Biehn does what it can. The effects aren't terrible either although the ghosts are rarely scary, veering from Pang Brothers' The Eye-style rotting undead spooks to more J-horror-ish stylized ghosts drawn directly from folklore.

"Isn't completely terrible" is hardly a recommendation though. The plot is crap. Not only is it borderline racist, the heroes actually win in the end. What's the use of a curse from beyond the grave if the ghosts in question are just going to give the living the benefit of the doubt and let them off the hook? It's lame. The use of jump-scares in the film is almost criminal too. It's one thing to add a cue for a jump-scare into the sound mix for the old cat-in-the-closet trick, it's quite another to do it when a character rounds a corner and is confronted with... an empty hallway.

This could have been something, but it needed someone with bigger balls livening up the script and shooting it. Barbarash, who's main previous credits include working on Cube spinoffs like Cube Zero, apparently wasn't that someone.