In a word, god-awful... too many plot holes.. um, yeah... Who takes their kid to dig up a dead body in the middle of the night? and what's up with his wife stealing the skeleton.. who does that? why, exactly did the shrink stab himself in the neck? and that whole dog thing.. i mean, really! Having Sparrow narrate from the beginning also just completely destroyed the suspense for me.. i mean, if he's narrating the story, clearly he's lived to tell it, so there's no chance of him getting offed.. where's the suspense there? <br /><br />Of course, you expect plot holes in a film like this. But, there are so many I lost track of the story completely because of them. What kind of name is Fingerling? Or Toppsy? Why did the wife dig up the body? (Who does that?) or go into that crazy spooky asylum alone? and where'd all those candles come from? Why does the writer have his PO BOX in the freaking book??? I mean come on... And the book just happens to find its way to the bookstore next door to the wife's bakery?? Way too convenient... Oh and Happy Birthday Honey, here's a book about a serial killer.. What a THOUGHTFUL gift! The book is like 20 pages long, half of which are blank, and it takes him freaking FOREVER to read it. If he's truly obsessed with this book, wouldn't he have read it all in one shot?<br /><br />A bit convenient for him to bump into his future wife (carrying a cake!) about 23 seconds after being released from a mental hospital.. how old was he playing? 36?? <br /><br />Was I the only one at the end rooting for the bus to actually run the guy down? Not good when you're rooting for the protagonist to bite it in the end.<br /><br />It seems like this was written by committee.. I imagine that the first draft probably had nothing to do with the number 23... It seems as if they needed a gimmicky hook to bait the audience into thinking there was some supernatural thing going on, when in the end it really didn't seem to have anything to do with anything. I mean, I wasn't expecting the Godfather or anything, but everything about this film was a total let-down. Without all the numerology stuff, this movie could actually have been OK, instead of some hackneyed Se7en knockoff.<br /><br />Not scary, unintentionally hilarious and otherwise a total snoozer.