Korea has made a name for itself, exporting all the creepy and genre-defying, well, genre films in the last two decades. I love Korean genre films and television, from monster movies to zombie TV shows to last year’s Oscar winner. With such an amazing output, there’s bound to be a dud or two. And unfortunately, Metamorphosis is that dud.

To be fair, if you’ve followed my writing, you know I don’t particularly like possession/exorcism movies. But sometimes one comes around, like The Wailing, that do enough to make me reappraise my dislike. Metamorphosis, though, is strictly a Christian exorcism movie set in a different country. It begins with a young priest named Joong-soo (Bae Sung-woo) performing an exorcism of a young girl, complete with blood vomit, pulsating neck growths and taunting demonically-enhanced voices. The possessed girl managed to break free of her bonds and throws herself out the window, warning Joong-soo that she will be back before she plummets to her fence-impaling death.

The shunned priest has also brought disgrace to his older brother Kang-gu (Sung Dong-il) and his family, including his wife Myung-joo (Jang Young-nam) and their three children, Sun-woo (Kim Hye-Jun), Hyun-joo (Cho Yi-Hyun) and Woo-jong (Kim Kang-Hoon). So they are forced to move to a new place in order to escape the taunts and abuse from the townspeople who blame the entire family for the young girl’s death. But their new house has problems. For one, someone has strung up a bloodied cat in their window and at night, a rhythmic pounding and slurpy, gurgling wet sound keeps them awake.

Even worse, their next door neighbor is kind of a weirdo jerk. His yard is filled with upside down crosses painted on stakes, skinned animals and a wall made of screaming faces. Inside, the neighbor’s house is worse, with skinned animals and upside down crosses hanging from the ceiling and a goat splayed open in front of an altar.

Not exactly cozy.

But then the parents start randomly acting weird, with the father turning incestously pervy and the mom begins eating like a starved animal, just really going to town on her breakfast. And when the son says it tastes weird, she reaches out and starts stuffing that food into her mouth before offering up the already chewed food to her son. There’s a demon in the house and, as the title suggests, it’s taking on the form of various family members until no one knows who to trust.

Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. There’s a lot going on in this film and I’m sad to say that most of it is bad. The long and the short of it is that Metamorphosis pulls from a variety of possession and exorcism movies without adding much to the narrative.

Makeshift exorcism in a basement? Check. Blankets being pulled down and blamed on a sibling? Check. A family that’s forced to sleep in one room when the haunting gets spooky? So many little moments seemingly lifted from The Conjuring. But it also is about a crisis of faith a la The Exorcist and with all of the effects available today, the inevitable exorcisms (plural) it still feels silly. It also, randomly, has a sequence in which the priest is visited by the demon, complete with blood raining down from the ceiling, drenching everything in copious amounts of red. It’s like the finale of the Evil Dead remake up in his parsonage.

The acting is rough and wooden and when it randomly cuts to non-American priests all chatting in English in a parsonage in a different country, it’s painful to watch. From stock characters to, sadly, stock actors, to stock effects…it also feels like a cheap replica of the bad The Conjuring riffs we’d see in America. It’s just sadly not good.

The idea of a demon that can shapeshift and turn a family against itself is fantastic on paper. I was imagining a kind of psychological game of cat and mouse where you don’t know who is the demon; a exorcistic Body Snatchers, maybe. Instead, it devolves into unintended silliness. You know those old Scooby-Doo TV episodes where our crew would run into one room and magically appear out of another? Imagine that here, as our demon would attack someone and then exit stage left at the exact moment the real person would enter stage right. Scenes that were intended to be menacing left me giggling at the absurdity. And unfortunately, any of the drama and tension built up in the beginning soon fell the way of melodrama.

It’s unfortunate. But I guess they can’t all be winners.