I love a movie with a good trick ending. The Sixth Sense when you first realized that Bruce Willis’ character was dead. Righteous Kill when the main killer of the story switched before your eyes. Even The Village, when you first notice that the villagers are part of some psychological experiment. Many movies, and their directors, are capable of pulling off a trick ending without having the audience feel as if they have been left in a cloud of confusion. This is not the case in the latest horror flick, The Uninvited.

With a decent cast (Emily Browning and Elizabeth Banks), many expected The Uninvited to be 2009’s first decent horror movie. The previews made it seem as if Elizabeth Bank’s character, the house nurse Rachel, would be the primary killer and plot device. However, at the same time, there was the underlying notion of creepy, gore-infested characters that crept out from underneath beds. The Uninvited seemed incapable of choosing a genre to associate with, making it hard-to-follow from the get go.

There were some points of The Uninvited that were relatively clever. Alex, the sister of Emily Browning’s character Anna, was creative, exciting, and funny on camera. The storyline was interesting: Anna, having survived a fire that killed her mother, starts to see dead people that were involved in the subsequent investigation. She suspects Rachel, her father’s new love interest, and starts to compile a way to get rid of the new burden and bring herself some emotional peace.

The movie, up until that point, is something definitely worth seeing. You can scare your friends in the theater when the graphically creepy ghosts jump out and you can laugh when some of the lines are just a little too cheesy. The Uninvited has every aspect of a great horror flick for thirteen-year-olds (think Scream) until the very end. It was almost the perfect Halloween movie that would make you scream and laugh at the same time. Until the trick ending.

I will not spoil the trick ending here, but it is quite possibly the worst plot twist in horror film history. So when you go to see The Uninvited remember that while the film is definitely worth seeing if you enjoy a good thriller/horror flick, the ending will have you cursing the line “I see dead people” all the way back to your dorm room.