Gore is always with us, but when it comes to horror, there’s nothing like a haunted house. And “Lovely Molly” has a humdinger — a genuine Colonial that is the unlikely home of the young title character, who’s a maid at a mall, and her trucker husband.
For the first half-hour or so, director Eduardo Sánchez works with that, and not much else, and demonstrates that a well-timed door slam and a cleverly framed shot of an ordinary household object are as creepy as ever.
The tropes Sanchez pioneered with “The Blair Witch Project” became clichés at warp speed, a fact he has the wit to confront from the first shot. The feel for the fright in the everyday, as well as for the arid emptiness of a low-income, semirural town, is marvelous.
Then we piece together what’s wrong with Molly, and the answer registers as “ugh, not this again.” That, plus gaps in logic (no one ever just leaves a haunted house, do they?) and such ho-hum elements as a sexually repressed pastor, bog down the movie.
Still, the two main actresses — Gretchen Lodge as Molly and Alexandra Holden as her hard-living sister — do fine work. It’s a respectable horror movie, even if it’s better at showing things that go bump in the night than at showing us why.