Parents' Guide to Imaginary

This mostly terrible horror movie relies on chunks of ideas recycled from older movies, several predictable jump scares, and monster lore that wobbles all over the place and makes little sense. Directed by Jeff Wadlow, Imaginary begins with a cheat of an opener, a sequence involving a giant spider attack that's—guess what?—only a dream. Once it really gets going, the movie has trouble establishing exactly what the characters are facing. It could be the teddy bear, or the creepy-looking blurry figures that leer at people and bare their teeth in the dark backgrounds, or the spider, or a giant, demonic version of the bear, or even another monster that incorporates the collected imaginations of millions of children.

This movie doesn't know what it wants, and in the end can't summon up much more than a handful of dumb jump scares, half of them "fake" ones intended to make viewers jump and then laugh (neither of which is likely to happen). Audiences will spend at least several minutes recalling earlier movies that did all of this better. At least the family dynamic—with stepmom Jessica trying to relate to and communicate with her new stepdaughters—feels fairly close. But Imaginary is, overall, an opportunistic movie that didn't bother with creating a solid story before it went in front of the cameras.