From the studio behind The Scary Robot and The Scary Pool comes The Scary Bear, a girl-meets-teddy chiller so threadbear it bearly koalafies as a film.

The ‘family moves house, discovers possessed toy’ plot hardly bears repeating ever again, but apparently Jason Blum has kids to feed inane horror movies to. His latest frightless scrape of the barrel is aimed squarely at the younger demographic, a bearfaced attempt to maximise the profitability of its Bear-minimum concept. It is the pathetic result of Blumhouse executives gazing across the backlot at New Line’s lucrative Annabelle series and saying, “The Scary Doll? Why didn’t we think of that?!”

But Imaginary doesn’t even deliver on its possessed Paddington premise, failing to make the bear remotely scary or giving him any personality whatsoever. Ironically the film is so devoid of imagination it starts ripping off other Blumhouse productions, sucking its characters off into a spirit realm called “The Never Ever”, not to be confused with “The Further” from Insidious.

This is another movie where nothing happens yet requires a character (Betty Buckley) to provide a running commentary for all the nothing that is happening, explaining in painful detail how the spirit has projected itself into the bear in case anyone had fallen asleep at any point during its overstuffed runtime.

Despite putting the ted in tedium, Imaginary is more entertaining than Blumhouse’s previous offering, Night Swim. 10-year-old Pyper Braun is impressive as Jessica, the polite little girl who befriends the teddy, and the movie has the courtesy to feature a man in a giant bear costume. But the best moment is when a child therapist (Verónica Falcón) accuses Jessica of dabbling in ventriloquism. As though that might explain her attempt to impale herself on a rusty nail.

In the end though, this is another victory for the Blumhouse marketing machine, whose catchy high concepts and comical posters get our imaginations running, only to discover that the actual film was Imaginary all along.