My quick rating – 3.9/10. Yellow Eyes starts with an old man crawling toward a door, desperately trying to paint something on it before apparently meeting his maker. He tells us he can see now, which raises approximately seventeen questions before the movie has even introduced itself. There’s an eye on the door, plenty more drawings of eyes during the credits, and eventually we learn an old relative has died and left our young couple a house.

Because horror movies have a standing agreement with inherited real estate. If a dead relative leaves you a house, burn the paperwork and run.

Instead, they go from “I wonder if we’ll get the house?” to “Let’s move in and dump all our money into it!” almost instantly. Never mind the creepy statue they discover walled up inside. Never mind the evil-eye imagery. Never mind the fact that the place is practically screaming GET OUT. They’re homeowners now. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the demon, obviously.

Julia starts having creepy dreams involving finger eating and yellow eyes, which seems like a pretty clear indication that the new fixer-upper comes with a supernatural pest problem. But she has an impressive ability to fall asleep through things that would have me sleeping in the parking lot of a police station. At one point I genuinely wondered if the movie forgot to mention that Julia is narcoleptic.

Nena Martins is fine as Julia. Not bad, not great, but she’s stuck with a character making some questionable decisions. Michael Kunicki never sold me on Brad at all. When he tried to turn up the emotion, it somehow came across even worse, making it difficult to give a crap about his character.

And then there’s the statue, which is really where the movie loses me. We’re told it’s haunted and houses something powerful, but Yellow Eyes never bothers to properly explain what the hell this thing actually is. Where did it come from? What’s its history? What are its rules? What does it want? Why does it possess people?

I don’t need a ten-minute mythology lecture, but when your entire movie revolves around a mysterious relic, maybe tell me something about the damn relic.

Instead, Yellow Eyes is a slow, unfocused horror movie that raises a dozen questions and lazily refuses to answer most of them. The scenes begin to merge into one another, the acting is low quality, and there are so many bad choices that I was more annoyed that they haven’t left yet. That is assuming the characters can stay awake long enough to be dumb.

There is some wasted potential here. The creepy imagery works in places, and the Chicago-area setting is always a bonus for me. Unfortunately, the movie never turns its decent ideas into anything particularly memorable.

And just when you’re hoping the movie is finally going somewhere, it throws in a sequel tease that nobody wants, and certainly is not unearned.