The latest person to join them is Sally (BAILEE MADISON), Alex's young daughter who's been shipped there by her mom back in Los Angeles. The girl isn't pleased by any of this, and shows her displeasure by behaving quite coldly toward Kim who really wants to connect with her and thus is frustrated by the behavior.

Sally thinks she might have found kindred spirits in the form of voices that emanate from the vents in her room and encourage her to come down and join them in the huge basement, a space Alex and Kim didn't realize existed until the girl stumbles across it. Little do any of them know that those voices belong to small monsters that live in the basement's ash pit, a vertical shaft bolted shut long ago after a former owner had a bad run-in with the creatures.

Sally ends up removing that barrier and must then contend with those little monsters, that don't like bright light, as they make their way through the house and into her room at night.

That's a definite must for truly frightening movies like "The Exorcist" or "The Shining." For those designed both to make you laugh and "scare" you, sometimes the theater will do, especially if the level of camp is high and the audience is receptive to that. But when that sort of crowd ends up attending a movie that's seemingly designed to unnerve and scare you, the results can be disastrous, both for the filmmakers and those wanting to view the film the way it was intended to be seen.

Case in point was our press meets promo screening for "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark." Had those in attendance only been critics, we might have heard a knowing laugh (nervous, appreciative or some combination thereof) here or there. But since the public was also invited, and the vast majority of these people apparently can't keep their yaps shut, the screening turned into a circus that got progressively rowdier and louder as it proceeded, with many patrons deciding to add their own audio commentaries to the story.

As a result, what actually worked for me in a film such as "Paranormal Activity" (where the audience response made the experience quite entertaining), rubbed me the wrong way with this latest offering. And that's because it turned what might have been a decent scare-fest into the equivalent of the denizens of the local zoo being spooked and thus letting out a raucous cacophony of their individual sounds. In short, their spirited commentary, responses and general noise turned the flick into something rather different than what the filmmakers and releasing studio probably intended.

Then again, many parts of the film -- particularly in the weaker second half -- are obviously designed to goose the audience and elicit shrieks of "Look out!" and "Oh no!" -- especially when poke-worthy objects slowly aim their way toward delicate human facial parts. The camp is also clearly present, although I liked it better when the pic was called and featured plenty of "Gremlins."

To be fair, writers Matthew Robbins & Guillermo del Toro (the latter also produced but didn't direct this time around) have remade the little seen (or at least remembered) TV film of the same name that first aired way back in 1973. Yet, while watching it, I was, and many viewers will be, hard pressed to push Gizmo, Stripe and the rest of Joe Dante's 1984 titular critters from my mind. You see, like those gremlins, the little monsters here hate bright light and are mischievous but deadly, and they initially aren't seen in full.

Instead, we just get fleeting, partial and dimly lit glimpses of them as their story, and that of the humans with which they interact, begins to unfold. Working from Robbins & del Toro's script, director Troy Nixey starts off with a gothic style bang in his prologue, where a maid and her master meet their demise thanks to the creatures that live in an old manor's basement ash pit, behind the grate that drops into a deep and dark vertical chasm.

Like some filmmakers have thankfully discovered in the past, most anyone's imagination is far more powerful than what any special effects team can manufacture or any filmmakers can then manipulate on the screen. Nixey and company seem to understand that, at least at first. But once we see the little beings (which make the gremlins seem enormous in comparison) in full, the imagination element evaporates, as does much of the dread and other unsettling elements.

In fact, when the interior decorator character played by Katie Holmes finally makes it to the library and finds sketches an earlier owner of the home made of these monsters, those still images end up being far creepier than the real thing. Sure, there are lots of close calls (including the obligatory bathtub scene) and "gotcha" moments (the best being a point of view trip under the covers looking for one of those things in a bed), but for the most part, the second half is much weaker than the first, and that's mostly due to us knowing what the human characters are up against.

It doesn't help matters that Holmes isn't terribly convincing in her part, which also holds true for Guy Pearce as her live-in boyfriend who's more preoccupied with rehabbing the old manor and getting into Architectural Digest than making sure his daughter (Bailee Madison) is happy and then safe. Some of the decisions those three make simply don't make sense and easily could have been fixed with a few script tweaks. Then again, vocal audiences like ours love that sort of stupid behavior and thinking on the part of their characters, so I guess it isn't surprising that it's present.

Which is too bad because the film doesn't have its moments, although the subject matter makes one ponder what del Toro (who directed "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Devil's Backbone") might have done had he also helmed rather than just co-write and produce the material. Decent, but not consistently strong and -- at least in the case of our screening -- ruined by an obnoxious audience that didn't fully understand what sort of pic they were really seeing, "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" might play better if seen at home, alone, and in the dark. On its first viewing in the aforementioned atmosphere, it rates as a 5.5 out of 10.