If a messenger could give you a word of advice, you better hope that it’s to prepare yourself for “”The Messengers,”” a horror movie of the worst kind. It’s not because “”The Messengers”” is a terrible movie; it’s just because it’s a cookie-cutter replica of one, borrowing bits and pieces from other stories to make 84 minutes of uncreative clutter.

The directing, by Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, is lifeless. The camera shots are unimaginative, and the best parts are horror so cheesy you’ll laugh.

The story is one you’ve heard before. A family moves to a small country town in North Dakota in order to start a new life. They happen to move into a house startlingly similar to one in “”The Amityville Horror.”” The daughter, Jess, (Kristen Stewart) starts seeing ghosts her little brother Ben (Theodor Turner) has been seeing all along.

Since she’s the stereotypical troubled teen, acting rebellious like Avril Lavigne, her parents don’t believe her sightings. That is, until they start seeing the ghosts themselves.

The movie wouldn’t be complete as a clichǸ horror movie without a plethora of fat crows that storm

Jess’ father Roy (Dylan McDermott) and a scary gruff lumberjack named John Burwell (John Corbett).

The crows are everywhere in the movie – and overplayed. At first, when they’re eating the sunflower seeds that Roy is going to plant, they make sense. A little foreshadowing with them is fine. Heck, even when Roy slaps one of the birds in the face a couple times to get the creature away, it’s appreciated and followed by an uproar of laughter.

But then it’s just too much. They injure John on the back and knock him down with their beaks. They swarm all over the house several times, trying to set the “”horror”” scene. But they fail. Hitchcock would definitely have been dismayed.

Then there’s the lousy camera work. There is no creativity in any of the shots. When the directors want the audience to laugh, they randomly pass the body of a ghost across the screen for a few seconds. Of course this grabs a small jolt from the spectator, but it’s not creative. Another scene in the movie has Jess and John talking in the sunflower field while the camera circles around them incessantly. Talk about getting dizzy; it was more dreadful than watching “”The Blair Witch Project.””

You know the drill. Horror movie directors need to take notes on the horror classics of the past. Shoddy special effects aren’t needed in a horror movie in order to make it good. It all depends on the creativity of the story and the way in which it is presented to the audience. For this, “”The Messengers”” fails on purpose, for it knows what kind of audience would watch this movie.