Every group of horror movie vacationers includes an apparent nice guy and a designated butthead. The nice guy is Christian, who has a crush on Megan. The designated butthead is Mark, who, though not all that bad a guy by the standard of horror-movie designated buttheads, can still be counted upon to say the wrong or the insensitive or the lunkheaded or the vulgar thing in every situation. Here's Mark making sure that the girls pick up enough toilet paper during a supply run to the local convenience store. "Don't forget the toilet paper! Last time I had to wipe my ass with a potato chip bag!" One of the girls shrieks, "Mark!" Mark says, "What? It was barbecue! [Do you know] how much it burns?" Once again, we have the night of the living too much information. The experience could have been even more painful, Mark. Thank your lucky stars that it was a bag. You could have had no options but the peel-off lid of a Pringles can.

In any event, Megan starts experiencing supernatural visions, including images of cracked fingernails. The car's lights turn on in the middle of the night. A creepy old man (Ermey) warns Megan of sinkholes that swallow people who go walking in the wrong part of the bayou. The convenience store clerk, Nick (Hoechlin), whose good looks set all the girls to eye-popping double-takes, suggests that a magic ritual might be just the ticket. It's not until a long, long time later, literally the last 20 minutes of the film, that any sense of supernatural menace is achieved, when terrible secrets are revealed at night, in torrential rain. Ooooh.

Pretty people have their weekend ruined

Daniel Myrick was the director of the smash hit The Blair Witch Project, which he's followed with several other direct-to-video films unseen by this reviewer but not noted for any equivalent impact on the pop-culture zeitgeist. He and his fellow screenwriters on this film deserve some credit for attempting a supernatural haunting story that hinges on the slow investigation of a mystery, and not extreme violence or widescreen pyrotechnics. The solution, when it comes, is both surprising and logical in retrospect. But, boy, does it take a long time to get there. This is a 91-minute film that takes almost a full hour to get started.

Before then, we get a bunch of photogenic young 20-somethings enjoying what they hope to be a pleasant weekend in the bayou. And this kind of works, but when you cast everybody but the creepy old neighbor (who for much of the film might as well be a Scooby-Doo villain) for attractiveness of the exact same kind, it can be hard to tell them apart. It may take even alert viewers a while to master (or care about) distinguishing pretty blonde Megan from pretty blonde Alicia, and the same can be true with respective boyfriends Mark and Christian, even though these characters don't look all that much alike. The sameness of type is there anyway. This is a problem that has become increasingly prominent in low-budget horror films, where actors of both sexes now seem to get cast not because they can embody memorable characters but because they can be lined up and photographed with brooding expressions on the movie poster or DVD box. It's even worse here, because a twin sister also played by Hamois (with a different hair color) is integral to the backstory. It's really, really hard to get lost in a film of any genre when you're so often obliged to ask, "Wait a minute. Which one is she again?"

What we're left with, really, is the charm of the performers, which is often substantial. These are pretty people to look at, even if it's hard to believe that a group of modern-day young adults enjoying a casual weekend at a country house, in this day and age, would get dressed up as much as they do for a dinner at home. All in all, they're much more interesting when they're enjoying themselves than when they're dealing with the not-very-intrusive plot.

Special kudos to Amanda Seyfried, who plays Zoe, and who sports one hell of an effective comic take throughout. In any group shot of the friends having fun together, she's the one the eye gravitates toward, because she's always the one whose reactions are most enjoyable to watch.