Horror movie subjects, like celebrity deaths and buses, come in threes. Thus, trailing behind the latest, recycled rash of 'bad seed' pictures The Unborn and Orphan, like some sulky teenager on a family holiday, comes the Renee Zellweger-starring Case 39 - another apparent anti-adoption screed, from the director of Pandorum. Clearly, Philip Larkin got it back to front, and Cyril Connolly was onto something: they screw you up, kids, especially other people's kids, while that pram in the hall almost certainly contains 57 varieties of pain. And little girls, of course, are absolutely terrifying. That's why Stanley Kubrick used not one but two of them in The Shining.

The latest threat to homeland security is sad-eyed moppet Lillith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland). Despite whimpering that her hollow-eyed, crucifix-clasping parents "talk about sending me to Hell", Lillith's lank black hair is scraped back and tucked behind her ears, which everyone knows is movie shorthand for 'sneaky 'n' weird'. She also tilts her head sideways when she speaks, which even brain-damaged pitbulls dimly appreciate is the internationally-recognised symbol for 'run, run like the wind'. Now you mention it, she also shares a name with Frasier Crane's ex-wife, in turn named after a Hebrew storm demon associated with death, darkness and vengeance. All of which is lost on lentils-for-brains social worker Emily Jenkins (Renee Zellweger), who hauls her out of the kitchen oven after her folks attempt to bake her alive.

In a move even the filmmakers realise stretches credibility to twanging point, Emily temporarily adopts Lillith while she waits to be re-housed with foster parents who won't mistake her for a birthday cake. Unfortunately for Emily, what Lillith wants, Lillith gets. And what she really wants right now is an ice cream. Not just today, every day. See, this witchy cuckoo also possesses the ability to make people see and experience their own worst fears. So you'd better hurry up with that 99 Flake.

Before the first hour's up, Em's other cases and colleagues are slaughtering their slumbering parents with a tyre iron or being pestered to death by a plague of CGI hornets, vomited out of their every orifice. Meanwhile Em's barricading herself in her bedroom every night and attempting to burn her own house down, with the satanic little charge inside. "A damaged, deceitful, manipulative child is not a demon," insists grizzled, perma-tanned detective Mike Barron (Ian McShane). But can Emily convince her Barron knight that Lillith has got the very devil in her?

By Ali Catterall