DVD Review: The Haunting in Connecticut
The Haunting In Connecticut (2009)
Studio: Lionsgate
DVD Release Date: July 14, 2009
Directed By: Peter Cornwell
Cast: Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Elias Koteas, Amanda Crew & Erik Berg
Review By: Annie Riordan
Just once – just fricken ONCE – I’d like to see a horror movie which is supposedly “based on actual events” stick to its goddamned source material. Stop trying to jazz it up with shit that didn’t happen, drama that never occurred and characters that never existed. Just STOP it, already!
The hotly debated “facts” in the actual case were disturbing enough to make for an excellent pilot episode of the paranormal soap opera “A Haunting” on the Discovery Channel. (on a side note, Discovery did not renew the series after the fourth season, and Bio ended up picking up the reruns) The story had all of the elements necessary for a good ghost story: a family traumatized by the eldest son’s diagnosis of cancer, the search for a home closer to the hospital where he receives treatment and the discovery of embalming tools in the basement of said house after the purchase has been made. What follows is a classic blueprint: kids see ghosts, teenage son starts acting weird and situation violently escalates until some ghost hunters are called in to exorcise the former funeral home. Sounds about perfect, right?
But nooooo. The filmmakers responsible for this “re-imagining” decided that a new subplot was in order, and threw in some incoherent garbage about seances, necromancy, skin-graffiti and a kid who vomits ectoplasm. Toss in an embarrassed looking Elias Koteas as a ghostbusting preacher man and the whole thing veers right off the road of plausibility and smack into the guardrail of ridiculousness. Pretty soon, we’ve got hordes of white eyed, scarred up zombies wandering around the set for reasons which remain muddy and any credibility this movie might have been aiming for goes straight down the toilet with an audible flush. By the time an expressionless Amanda Crew disentangles herself from the clutches of a possessed shower curtain and goes about her business with barely a “Huh, that was weird” acknowledgement, I officially gave up trying to give a shit about anyone in this film. It becomes almost impossible to discern the live cast from the undead cadavers shuffling about, they’re all so equally void of emotion.
It all ends with the triumphant torching of the house to free the evil and cleanse the profaned ground…except that this never happened in real life, and most people with even a passing interest in this movie have probably already seen A Haunting or have at least heard about the basic facts (cough) of the actual case and will be shouting “What the FUCK?!” at films end, and rightly so…assuming they didn’t shut tit off in disgust 40 minutes earlier, as I was sorely tempted to do.
Once again, lovely Virginia Madsen is wasted, although she fares better here than in The Number 23 as she does not have to pretend to be attracted to Jim Carrey this time around. And despite the fact that he is given little to do besides pout and look scared and/or tired, Kyle Gallner does a good job as the cancer riddled, freaked out Matt. But neither of them can save this from being a dumbed down juvenile jumpscare vehicle which tries to do too much and succeeds in achieving nothing at all. In the end, the only thing that “The Haunting in Connecticut” has in common with the actual haunting in Connecticut is that they both take place in Connecticut. Lame.
Brutal As Hell Rating:
1 out of 5
