While watching movies for review, I often take notes on my iPhone, as I did for Shutter. Tellingly, the device infamous for incorrect autocorrections wanted to change “Shutter” to “Shitter.” Given that “shutter” is a legitimate word, I can’t explain the switcheroo; perhaps, as in this film, otherworldly forces beyond our understanding were trying to tell me something.

Shutter, shitter: It fits. Shudder.

Newlyweds Ben and Jane Shaw (The Skulls’ Joshua Jackson and Transformers’ Rachael Taylor, respectively) move from the U.S. to Japan for his new job as a fashion photographer. Driving late at night to their new digs, Jane runs over a young Asian woman who suddenly appears in the middle of the road, then loses control of the vehicle and plows into a tree. Both Shaws emerge with only minor scrapes; the woman is nowhere to be found, nor is blood, let alone any trace of her to suggest she existed as nothing more than a figment of Jane’s weary imagination.

If so, that’s some imagination, because subsequent photos taken of and/or by Jane develop with inexplicable smears of white. Ben’s assistant refers to them as “spirits,” so to whom should Jane turn for counsel? Why, Tokyo’s own “spirit-photography magazine,” of course! (Want more unbelievability? The publication appears to have a paid staff of 10.) What do these spirits start to do? Kill people, of course!

A remake of the 2004 Thai film of the same name, Shutter exists as one of many substandard Americanizations of Asian horrors — Dark Water, Pulse, One Missed Call — that smothered our multiplexes in the aughts, following the wave created by The Ring and The Grudge. In keeping with those films, director Masayuki Ochiai (Infection) gives Shutter’s story space to breathe. That is a nice way of saying it’s slow. But a slow burn, it is not. Unworthy of its slight time investment, it is a humorless piffle that checks off the boxes with duty and without enthusiasm.

Only at the denouement does the movie break from its sleepiness long enough to convey a jolt. I’ve yet to conclude if that twist is truly clever or utterly ridiculous; then again, I stopped thinking about it the next morning — already several more hours than the whole deserves. —Rod Lott

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Now that all of them are married, three sisters are called to New York for the reading of their father’s “highly irregular but legal” will. The document decrees that they and their spouses are to reside “in sexual harmony” at his island estate for three days. Then and only then shall his mysterious trunk be brought down from the attic and shared among the women.

Presumably, the inheritance includes the Victorian house, although its halls and walls bear such gaudy wallpaper, I’m not sure who would covet the property. Perhaps The Ghastly Ones refers to these eyesores of rooms? Or maybe the home’s three servants, one of whom (Hal Borske) is a half-wit hunchback with novelty Bubba teeth and a craving for live rabbits.

A brief tear of murder begins when the bloodied, furry corpse of a bunny turns up beneath one couple’s sheets, prompting the serious admission, “It’s not very comfortable having a dead animal put in your bed.” (My favorite bit of dialogue? “I did not, you brazen hussy.”) Performances are accidental in The Ghastly Ones, as they are in all of Andy Milligan’s penny-ante productions that escaped from his mad mind: a sex-gore netherworld that includes Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers and (exclamation points his, of course) The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

His directorial approach is an anti-style marked by not much going on in the upper half of the frame, the camera appearing clearly in the mirror (especially startling for an attempted period piece as this) and being so in-your-face as to accentuate his cast members’ nose hairs and blemishes. A considerable amount of blood also exists, exceeded only by boredom. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.