This is a movie that features former “Sex and the City” hunk John Corbett
looking more like David Crosby than you can possibly imagine and “The Practice”
lawyer Dylan McDermott as a sunflower farmer. Both are subjected to humiliating
attacks by flocks of angry crows.

If that sounds like fun, be warned that most of the rest of the film is
extremely boring. It’s as if someone took the worst 54 minutes of “Places in
the Heart” and spliced it with the worst half-hour of “The Grudge 2.”
Hopefully, this is both the beginning and the end of the agricultural horror
genre.

McDermott makes a decent Secret Service agent and a convincing cutthroat
attorney. He would probably be a good TV series doctor and could easily pull
off a professor or a corporate accountant. But as much as the actor looks good
hailing a taxi, he’s completely out of place trying to repair a tractor.

Roy (McDermott) has just moved from Chicago to rural North Dakota with his
wife, teen daughter and toddler son. It’s not a very fun trip, because his
spouse (Penelope Ann Miller) is a bit of a shrew, his daughter is a drama queen
and his son sees dead people. Corbett adds a little fun when he shows up as a
ranch hand, if you can resist the urge to break into “Almost Cut My Hair.”

The ghosts in “The Messengers” sneak around Roy’s new home, an old
fixer-upper that looks like it was designed by “The Amityville Horror” house
architect. But this is no old-school haunting — the Pang brothers have built
one of those “Grudge”-”Pulse”-”Ring” universes where anything goes, whether
it’s black ooze in the basement, crows in the station wagon or scary pale
humanoid things skittering across the ceiling. Most of the scares are generated
by the soundtrack, which is mixed way too loudly and has sort of a bludgeoning
effect that is more annoying than frightening.

Screenwriter Mark Wheaton includes a lot of minutiae about sunflower
growing, but he doesn’t bother to give the ghosts in “The Messengers” much of a
reason for existing. Usually in a movie like this, there’s an Indian burial
ground that has been violated — or at least a scene in the last 10 minutes
where a main character sifts through newspaper clippings at the library,
unraveling a horrible story about a parent who killed his kids.

Instead, we get crows with no motivation, except to make the actors
they’re attacking look ridiculous. If Tippi Hedren taught us nothing else in
“The Birds,” pulling off a big-screen bird attack is about more than screaming
really loud and flailing your arms.

– Advisory: This film contains profanity, violence and a few loud
scares. There’s also a scene where Roy tries to feed his toddler whole carrots,
which is a serious choking hazard for a 2-year-old.

E-mail Peter Hartlaub at phartlaub@sfchronicle.com.