Okay. I know I run the risk of being called unhip, out of touch, behind the times, or the worst and most tired insult of all: an old guy on a porch. I don’t care. Jordan Peele’s Us is one of the most overhyped films in recent memory, and in my longtime favorite genre of horror, a stunningly missed opportunity.

And this is coming from someone who found Peele’s Get Out original, funny, scary and hugely entertaining. Peele poured his heart and soul into that Oscar-winner, and the result was a cleverly conceived comment on race relations and brilliantly executed story that pays off even more with each viewing. With Us, Peele seemingly wanted to do a horror film that was more profound, on a larger scale, with metaphorical threads running throughout, with no easy answers to plenty of baffling questions. He may have succeeded in doing that, but along the way forgot to include the entertainment factor.

I found the movie to be an absolute mess, a ghoulash of influences and conceits from so many classic horror movies that they overwhelm everything you’re watching and leave the viewer artistically and emotionally detached.

For the first half hour, I was engaged with the movie big time, but as soon as the “shadow family” showed up in the Wilsons’ remote country driveway to launch a non-stop home invasion torture party, I was bored in a matter of minutes. By the time a second shadow family was breaking into the house of the Wilsons’ good friends and murdering them, I was ready to exit the theater. Without any kind of setup for the horrific “turning point”, without any explanation or even hint of what might be going on, I did not find myself caring enough about the Wilsons or to even be scared for them.

By the time the movie finally ends—at least a half hour too late—we’re subjected to some far-fetched “solution” involving an underworld of shadow figures, hundreds of rabbits, fire, and Hands Across America. Dude, this is supposed to be a horror movie; why are you obligated to give us Stanley Kubrick on a bad day? What’s sad is that Get Out’s script worked so damn well; the only excuse I can think of for this travesty was that Peele was rushed to produce another big hit on the quick and shoved the screenplay into production without running it by someone who could have suggested a few useful revisions.

I’ve always found that the best horror stories are often the simplest. An unforgettable one from last year that not enough people saw, A Quiet Place, starred Emily Blunt and real-life husband John Krasinksi in a story about a family hiding in a country house, unable to make any noise that would attract a race of killer aliens that hunt by sound. Even though we never learned why the aliens were even there, the movie was claustrophobic and gripping from start to finish.

Or take my favorite ghost story, the original version of The Haunting made by Robert Wise in 1963 and based on the Shirley Jackson novel. The first five minutes of the film show and tell you why the huge, isolated house in upper New England is haunted. Then we meet the characters, particularly emotionally vulnerable Eleanor (Julie Harris), and as she begins to have a nervous breakdown while investigating the house with her team, we find ourselves slowly drowning in her fears.

Peele should have taken a lesson from these other films rather than just borrowing elements from them—or even from Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, in which the entire narrative is seen through the eyes of the main character so you’re wondering throughout if the horrors are real or a product of the protagonist’s mind. If he had stripped the story of Us down to Lupita Nyong’o’s traumatic childhood memory where she thought she saw her doppelganger on a Santa Cruz boardwalk and kept the entire story from her point of view with only her evil, “tethered” other showing up at the house, it may have been less broad a concept but the final twist would have still worked, and it would have been a far more scary and powerful movie.

There are so few great horror films now—this might be the first “serious” one since The Exorcist to earn a Best Picture nomination—that one with even a shred of originality is lauded like it’s the second demonic coming. Other than its fine directing and acting, I found Us to be a disjointed, sluggish disappointment, with stunningly poor execution of a good creepy idea that did not need to become a half-baked metaphorical statement.