Worst remake ever.
As a fan of the original, and of horror in general, I was very wary of this even before I saw it. Some of the imagery caught my eye and I decided to watch it with halfway decent hopes. Man was I wrong.
The storytelling is absolutely nonexistent. Everything that made the original family likeable or at least halfway relatable was completely striped out. The only semblance of back story about this family comes in the way of an absolutely horribly awkward conversation with a real estate agent and the mother blaming herself for her son being scared of everything by telling us she lost him in a mall 3 years ago. The only human emotion I felt for this entire family was feeling like how much of a cocky jerk the father was. Don't even get me started on the paranormal investigators. What a joke of a plotline that was.
To boot, the pacing of this film is terrible, especially if you've seen the original. There is no buildup to anything as everything happens with no sense of time. It literally feels like everything happened within the course of the first 2 days the family moves into the house. There is no sense of dread as Maddie makes contact with the dead, and there is no sense of urgency even as the final act commences. Everything and everyone just seems so commonplace as things happen to them, especially when the guy setting up the cameras almost gets his face drilled into while his arm is being sucked into the other world. He literally just walks back downstairs like nothing happened.
All in all this was a terrible movie and should be considered blasphemous to the original. I don't even think Uwe Boll could have made a worse movie.