Beware the nursery rhyme of fear
that serves as exposition here
it means the movie might just suck
and when you watch you're out of luck
but you spent money, so you're fucked

If I were to write a more honest plot summary, it would go something like this: "Two people find a doll outside their door, you get the idea they know each other somehow, bad things happen and a guy runs off and the cops let him, he goes to a small town where a bunch of people talk in rhyme, there's a ghost that's killing people." I would have more than that for you, but if I'm being honest, there's really no character development to speak of and any information you actually get about the characters and their backgrounds you have to infer from vague statements and flashbacks and the back of the DVD case, not from the script. Who are the two young people at the beginning of the movie? We know they're married and we know she dies before even watching the movie because the back of the DVD case tells us, but all the actual MOVIE tells us is "Hey, it's a doll. Hey, remember that poem from when we were kids about Mary Shaw? Weird, huh? AAAH, I'm dead." That's it. It's clunky and choppy instead of scary. But damn, ain't it pretty. Every scene is pretty, the movie is shot beautifully. Too bad the script reads like someone gave a typewriter to a group of monkeys. Or a group of drunken three year olds who've read way-y-y too much Dr. Seuss.

Yes, you heard me, Dr. Seuss. See, the people in this movie don't actually talk or have meaningful conversations, they all glower at each other and repeat the same poem over and over and over and over (and over and over...)

"Beware the stare of Mary Shaw
She had no children only dolls
And if you see her in your dreams
Be sure you never ever scream
or she'll bore you into a coma dream rip your tongue out at the seam."

Sorry, sorry. Cheap shot, I know. But I couldn't resist it. I WANTED to like this movie, and while the poem isn't Shakespeare, it was creepy enough to lead me to believe there would be a cool story behind it. Surprise! The poem IS the cool story, that's it, that's as far as the character development goes. The cops suspect the young man of killing his wife, but when he runs away to his hometown (inexplicably also taking a major piece of evidence with him when he goes) the cops do nothing but send one guy to follow him, and this one guy doesn't arrest him (why would he do that? Cops don't ARREST PEOPLE, silly) he just follows the guy around and lets him do a bunch of shady things (even when the bodies start piling up). And you'd think, since the young man is running home, he'd have some important information he wants to discover. Surprise again! He just runs into and out of houses, screaming this poem at people who repeat it back at him.

I kid you not. First, he goes to a big house and meets a woman who hugs him, and in the next five seconds or so we learn she's his step mom and his father had a stroke and he's mad at his father, and then that character development is over and instead of asking any kind of important question, he quotes the poem, and his dad repeats it, and then he runs out the door again. That's it. Then he runs to the funeral home ostensibly to make funeral arrangements, but guess what he does? Yep, he quotes the poem at the funeral director who quotes it back at him, and then he leaves. And then he meets the funeral director's plot device crazy wife who talks to birds and people who aren't there. Then there's a lightening-quick funeral scene and he runs off into the graveyard and finds a grave and the funeral director's crazy wife shows up again to deliver some vital piece of evidence on how to stop the curse (or whatever it is, we're still not really sure at this point). It's fortuitous that there are always ample amounts of crazy old people hanging around in horror movies to deliver much needed exposition. And at this point, we STILL don't know who Mary Shaw is except that she had dolls instead of kids and she's dead and pissed off at the town for some reason.

Oh wait, no it's not, that's all a complete lie, THIS is why she's really pissed, she was wrongfully accused of killing a boy. Wait, she really DID kill the boy? Well then she has no right to be pissed off, does she? I mean, in movies like this there's usually some sense of balance in the universe, some evil that was done wrongfully that turned an innocent person into a ghostly killer bent on revenge (and even in a movie like A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the villain was guilty of some terrible crime, there's a sense that the action taken against him in the past was so violent that it sent things out of whack and two wrongs don't make a right or some such thing). Here it's impossible to tell if the filmmakers just wanted to be different or if they were really inept and they just didn't think the story through enough. Mary's pissed, she's killing people, that's all that matters, right? No, no it's NOT all that matters. Why is she doing it? I know she's crazy, but is that ALL?

Lots of people are crazy, but they don't become obsessed with making dolls out of humans. Never mind any of that though, forget all the unanswered questions you'll have (which I can't list here for fear of ruining the "plot"), the story isn't what matters, let's just throw a bunch of creepy images at people and they'll buy it and be scared and we won't have to worry about filling in a back story, we'll trick them into thinking they saw one when they didn't.

Bottom Line: Scary images do not a good movie make. Yes, they're creepy, but I can go out and rent a movie with creepy images that actually has a story, there's no reason for me to rent this one. If you want audiences to like your movie, you have to give them a reason. Creepy little nursery rhymes are all well and good, but if that's all your movie has to offer, it's not enough. I can write in rhyme, too:

Beware the screenplay when it seems
that monkeys wrote it in their dreams
and if you pay to see the film
it's your own fault it makes you ill
avoid this cinematic swill.

See? It doesn't make for a review on its own, it doesn't tell you enough about why I think the movie fails, it shows wit and style and writing talent but on its own, it's not enough. I needed to write more to make this a review. And you needed to write more to make your collection of set pieces a movie. And you didn't.