Some states have quite a bit to boast about when it comes to horror. Texas has a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface, New York has a possessed house in Amityville, and North Carolina has Cape Fear and a deranged Robert De Niro. On the other hand, some states only think they have something truly terrifying to brag about. Point in case: Connecticut, the setting for “The Haunting in Connecticut,” a jumbled mess of a horror film that relies on cheap thrills and tiresome parlor tricks and, consequently, fails to conjure up any quality scares.
When watching this movie, it seems as if rookie director Peter Cornwell was a bit confused regarding the direction he wanted to take his first feature film in. Although the movie is meant to be a horror flick, Cornwell often loses focus and begins weaving in other plot threads, trying to center the audience’s attention instead on dramatic side stories about a family torn apart by crisis, or lessons about God and religion. In the end, all Cornwell effectively does is waste time not focusing on what truly matters: frightening audiences.
However, in Cornwell’s defense, he did not get a whole lot of help to begin with, relying on an uninspiring screenplay written by newcomer Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe, who’s only other noteworthy screenwriting credit is the 1984 comedy “Revenge of the Nerds.”
Supposedly based on a true story, the film involves a family that is forced to relocate into an old house near a clinic where their teenage son, Peter (Kyle Gallner, “Red Eye”), is receiving cancer treatment. Not long after moving in, Peter begins experiencing horrific supernatural events. Although the family blames Peter’s medicine at first for causing these hallucinations, they slowly begin to realize why they got the house, which just so happens to be a former funeral home with a dreadful past, for such a bargain.
When “based on a true story” flashes up on the screen at the beginning of a movie, it is difficult not to question what parts of this film are actually true. For all we know, the only true thing about this film is the fact that a family had a son with cancer and moved to a house in Connecticut.
There are a number of scenes in this film, though, that clearly bear a resemblance to other horror movies and, therefore, raise serious questions of factuality. For example, one scene has Peter running with an axe and chopping through doors to get to family members a la Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” Likewise, the film features age-old horror genre standards like having furniture eerily stack itself and the stereotypical priest who comes to purge out the demonic evil.
While Cornwell does deserve some praise for creating a movie that is not unnecessarily soaked in blood and gore like most of today’s horror films, he unfortunately still lacks originality when it comes to trying to scare audiences. Throughout the entire film, Cornwell utilizes hokey parlor tricks such as having dead people appear out of nowhere onto the screen. While this may be good for a couple of cheap scares early on, it quickly grows old.
Even worse is the fact the buildup to the scare never changes. The music picks up, the camera angle shifts and … oh look, another dead body. Once the surprise factor has been eliminated, these tricks are useless and, seeing as they are pretty much all Cornwell has up his sleeve for scaring audiences, the end result is a horror movie with no horror.
This, in turn, causes a serious problem because the only reason moviegoers watch horror movies is to be frightened. They sure as hell do not go for the acting, especially not for the acting in this film. Virginia Madsen (“The Number 23”) and Martin Donovan (“The Sentinel”), who play Peter’s parents, have just about as much personality as the dead bodies terrorizing them and rarely do their emotions feel authentic. Constantly skulking across the screen with an agonized expression, Gallner has the look of a tormented teen down, but that is where his acting talent begins and ends.
All in all, “The Haunting in Connecticut” is undoubtedly near the bottom of Hollywood’s long listing of haunted houses in film to see. In fact, you would be best off not even renting this house when it hits the market in a few months. Fortunately for Connecticut, UConn made it to the Final Four, preventing an all-around poor showcase of the state this weekend.
1 star out of 5.
