Cliche-ridden ghost story seems eerily familiar
Virginia Madsen plays a mother who rents a creepy house so she and her son (Kyle Gallner) can be closer to the cancer center where he is a patient. Unfortunately for the family, the house - a former funeral parlor - is already occupied by evil spirits.
“The Haunting in Connecticut” goes out of its way to establish its “real-life” bona fides, not only with its oddly mundane title, but also with its opening scene of a traumatized mom giving an interview about her family’s supernatural ordeal.
Like a ghost story told at a campfire, the scare factor is multiplied if the audience thinks it just might be true. But that’s a cop-out, a shortcut to spookiness that relieves the filmmakers of the burden of spinning a genuinely good yarn.
In fact, first-time director Peter Cornwell doesn’t seem to have anything except shortcuts in his narrative toolbox. Even before the Campbell family moves into their too-cheap-to-be-true rental house, he’s already breaking into the scary-movie cliches – quick zooms, shadowy lighting, ominous music. And that’s just for a car ride.
Virginia Madsen, best known as the object of Paul Giamatti’s fumbling affections in “Sideways,” stars as Sara, who rents the Victorian fixer-upper, despite its macabre history as a funeral parlor, to be near the cancer center where her teenage son is undergoing treatment. But since Matt (Kyle Gallner) is already on death’s door, he falls easily under the sway of the malevolent spirits that haunt the house.
The eerie buildup is mostly pro forma. Grotesque visages appear in mirrors, always accompanied by a “Psycho” shriek to startle the audience, even if none of the characters onscreen actually sees the images. It’s predictable and cheap, and not particularly scary. But the backstory of the haunted house, revealed slowly in sepia-toned hallucinations, really is creepy.
There’s the bespectacled undertaker, looking like a mad scientist out of central casting, who carves occultish lettering into the corpses’ skin with a scalpel. And then there’s the boy with the velvet-curtain bangs and the haunted eyes – and no wonder. He’s a medium, forced to conduct soul-wracking seances by his autocratic father.
The tale of the boy, Jonah, and the necromancer mortician is a lot more compelling than that of the Campbells. A subplot involving the father’s alcoholism (a nondescript Martin Donovan) is superfluous, and even the specter of Matt’s cancer makes little impression, because the characters are so thinly drawn that we don’t really care about them. It’s just more real-life baggage getting in the way of the ghost story.
When the two threads come together for the inevitable final battle, the film’s intensity picks up, although not its credibility. Matt and his cousin (Amanda Crew) piece together the history of the house with remarkable ease, and he has the good fortune of sharing a hospital room with a demonologist (Elias Koteas).
The climactic exorcism that follows might not be believable, but it’s a lot more exciting than the rest of the movie.
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‘THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT’
Rating: Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of terror and disturbing images
Length: 92 minutes
Playing at: Opens Friday at Century 20 Park Place, Century 20 El Con Mall, Century Park 16, Foothills, Tower Theatres at Arizona Pavilions, Harkins Tucson Spectrum 18, Century Theatres at the Oro Valley Marketplace
Grade: C+