Movie Review: The Haunting in Connecticut

If you’ve seen any of the Amityville Horror movies you know the arc of the story.

Anxious mom Sara Campbell (Virginia Madsen), eager to be closer to the clinic where sickly teen son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is receiving cancer treatment, talks her husband Peter (Martin Donovan) into renting a long-deserted Victorian house in upstate Connecticut. Peter remains tied up with his job, but Sara moves into the place with Matt, her two younger children (Sophi Knight, Ty Wood) and niece Wendy (Amanda Crew).

Unfortunately, as even the rental agent admits, the house has “a bit of a history.” Specifically, the Connecticut manse (played, quite convincingly, by a house in Teulon, Manitoba) used to be a funeral home where corpses were defiled and seances were conducted on a routine basis. Sara and her family learn about this only gradually, and not before Matt is beset by visions of a charred youngster whose long-ago involvement with the seances was, apparently, involuntary.

Floorboards creak ominously, wraiths appear fleetingly and, in one especially memorable scene, a bloody mop flops loudly. Still, nothing here rises above the level of routine haunted-house bumping-in-the-night. The overall structure is haphazard, with defining characteristics — such as Peter’s barely controlled alcoholism — abruptly introduced for immediate dramatic effect, then more or less forgotten about. And while a few lines really are intentionally funny (“Now we know why the rent was so cheap!”), too many scenes trigger snickers of the derisive sort.

Genre: Horror, Thriller

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Movie Trailer

Movie Website: HauntinginConnecticut.com

Actors/Actresses: Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas, Amanda Crew

Our Verdict:

Ticketbuyers will get far too few scares for their money with this based-on-fact ghost story.