Photo by Rebecca Sandulak/Lionsgate, Rebecca Sandulak/Lionsgate
Mom (Virginia Madsen) wonders: Is my son (Kyle Gallner) clawing the paneling because it's really boring in Connecticut or because he's possessed?
Something I learned from the movies: Never play hide-and-seek in a haunted house, unless you want to discover you're sharing your dumbwaiter hidey-hole with a ghostly charred corpse.
Photo by Rebecca Sandulak/Lionsgate
Mom (Virginia Madsen) wonders: Is my son (Kyle Gallner) clawing the paneling because it's really boring in Connecticut or because he's possessed?
Based on a chilling true story, Lionsgate's "The Haunting in Connecticut" charts one family's terrifying, real-life encounter with the dark forces of the supernatural. When ...
Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of terror and disturbing images
Length: 92 minutes
Released: March 27, 2009 Nationwide
Cast: Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas, Amanda Crew
Director: Peter Cornwell
Writer: Adam Simon, Tim Metcalfe
That's what happens to one of the unfortunate kids in "The Haunting in Connecticut," reportedly based on not just a true story but "the true story" (italics mine), according to the opening of the film -- a designation that suggests this post-Amityville boofest has been vetted for authenticity by some sort of supernatural accreditation agency. (Well, the saga of the real-life Snedeker family's alleged 1986 battle with the supernatural was the focus of a 2002 episode of the Discovery Channel paranormal documentary series, "A Haunting.")
Perfectly timed for the current housing crisis, "Haunting" finds mother Virginia Madsen on the hunt for real estate in unfortunately named Goats Woods, Conn., where she wants to relocate the large, extended Campbell family so her teenage son, Matt (Robert Pattinson-lookalike Kyle Gallner), can be closer to the hospital that is treating his cancer.
Soon, mom settles on a rambling old house that is "spacious and affordable," she tells dad (Martin Donovan). "I'm just wondering -- what's the catch?"
The catch in this case involves not mortgages but a mortuary: The house was once a funeral home-cum-crematorium where seances were conducted by a boy medium who spit ectoplasm from his orifices like toothpaste from a squashed tube while also opening a gateway to our world for the disgruntled dead.
In this spooky environment, it seems, Matt's fragile health makes him susceptible to visions from the Other Side. Or is he experiencing hallucinations caused by his new cancer medication?
Dad has chemical problems of his own: He's an alcoholic, which makes him a relatively unreliable witness to poltergeist activity. No wonder the kids take it upon themselves to recruit the local exorcist (Elias Koteas).
Directed by feature newcomer Peter Cornwell from a script credited to Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe, "The Haunting in Connecticut" won't sate the bloodlust of fans of "Last House on the Left" but may satisfy those who are sympathetic to the notion of real-life hauntings, and thus ready to be spooked by a film that splits the difference between the suggestive scares of the 1963 masterpiece "The Haunting" and the explicit thrills of the modern horror movie. Such moviegoers may take comfort from the story's spiritual foundation, which suggests that supernatural influences can be benign as well as malign, as indicated by Madsen's occasional placement in Cornwell's frame alongside a dangling rearview-mirror crucifix.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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