Necromantic Nitwittedness (The Haunting In Connecticut [2009] (DVD))

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	The Haunting In Connecticut [2009] (DVD)
Date:	14/08/09 (169 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of jolts and jumps and some good effects

Disadvantages: Very silly story and very limited basis on 'true events'

A review of just the film, The Haunting in Connecticut was produced in 2009 and released on region 2 DVD in July the same year. This is not to be confused with the 2002 production A Haunting in Connecticut, also available on DVD.

Teenager Matt Campbell is suffering from cancer, his treatment taking place in a hospital in Connecticut many hundreds of miles from home. As his condition worsens, the travelling becomes more and more intolerable and his mother, Sara, is forced to consider renting a second family home in Connecticut, where they can live until Matt ceases his treatment. Sara eventually finds a beautiful old house and quickly decides to move in to save Matt having to endure another lengthy, painful journey. Settling into the house, Matt decides to take the basement as his bedroom, but is intrigued by a darkened chamber that adjoins his room, with nobody apparently able to open the lock. But then one night, the door swings open of its own accord and Matt is gently immersed in the house's dark secrets...

Tagged as based on true events, The Haunting in Connecticut is allegedly based on a popular story about a family who experienced a supernatural presence whilst renting a house in Connecticut in the 1980s. With little evidence to support their stories, the tale has still grown to be a popular American ghost story and this is the second dramatisation to be made about the events that engulfed the family. With a screenplay written by one of the creative team behind Fright Night and Bones, The Haunting is, not surprisingly, a fast-paced jumpy little number that takes a morsel of supposed truth and embellishes it with a rather fantastical and liberal dose of fiction to keep the multiplex audiences entertained. It's generally quite effective, if not perhaps a little over-cooked.

The suggestion that this is based on true events is perhaps stretching the accuracy of the description a little and it's safe to say that the screenwriters have stretched the truth here about as far as it could possibly go. The narrative behind The Haunting is a dark, eerie little tale stuffed full of necromancy, séances and some gooey stuff called ectoplasm. It's not entirely original of course, with The Amityville Horror playing out to a reasonably similar formula and it does quickly become a little predictable. The family's desperation to have somewhere to live in Connecticut seems to equip them with the sort of resolve that only this genre requires, as we all know that any half-intelligent family would bail at the first sign of something untoward. But, in the great haunted house tradition, the Campbell family stick it out, to find themselves confronted by a hideously deformed visage in the basement and a box of mouldy eyelids in the attic. It's all just a bit too much of a stretch for the imagination, particularly later on when, in the film's climactic scenes, the very walls of the old house reveal a rather gruesome secret that, frankly, is pretty ridiculous.

That doesn't mean to say that it isn't sporadically successful because it is, but the success is achieved more as a result of the director Peter Cornwell piling on the shocks, as opposed to any kind of artistic subtlety. Certified a 15, the film is stuffed full of gory flashing imagery and a genuinely nasty group of spectres that will have even the most resolved members of the audience considering whether to sleep with the light on. It's made rather more successful by the combination of the supernatural with the ongoing human story of Matt's illness, the effect on his family and the suggestion that the events in the house are somehow linked to this. There's an obvious wasted opportunity here, whereby the creators could have played more cautiously on the suggestion that it's all the figment of a drug-induced hallucination but the arrival of the ubiquitous open-minded priest on the scene kind of puts paid to that idea once and for all. The fast-paced plot rather tends to leave subtlety at the door too and any expectation of a truly coherent conclusion will result in disappointment. The house's history is spelt out, in terms of what happened previously but the exact nature of what's happening in real-time is clumsily managed and rather painfully plotted, no more so than when Matt and cousin Wendy set about with the whole Scooby Doo mystery thing, complete with thoughtful looks into a mirage of different library images flashing across the screen. Just for once, it would be reassuring to know that a house with such a horrible history was actually pulled down to save yet another unsuspecting family from moving on.

The cast is unmemorable, with the exception of the leading lad. Traumatised teenager Matt (Kyle Gallner) is genuinely quite convincing, both as somebody suffering from a medical ordeal and as somebody who has just woken up to find himself in a house haunted by people with numbers sliced into their flesh. With Gallner, we're spared the convention of the usual hunky adolescent and there's a real tenderness between Gallner and his screen mother, Virginia Madsen. Madsen herself is reasonably good here, though not terribly convincing when put under real strain, particularly when the pressure of things on her as a mother is put to the test. Matt's father Peter is an obnoxious ex-alcoholic who adds very little to the proceedings and Martin Donovan seems completely bored with the role from start to finish. The moppets (Mary and Billy) are conventionally cute and the priest (Elias Koteas) is likeable but strangely too much like Robert de Niro for comfort and instantly unforgettable.

It would be untrue and unfair to say that The Haunting was a bad film because, in its way, it's a perfectly adequate little frightener, with box office numbers to bear testament to the audience appeal. But the trouble is that it's so terribly conventional. Even the eventual plot twist is entirely predictable, largely because the writers pace it that way. Everyone knows, for example, that an easy victory is an untenable one and when things are apparently resolved twenty minutes before the end, you just know something else is going to happen. Cornwell doesn't really have any surprises up his sleeve and whilst there's enough nastiness going on to give this a good, macabre edge (any squeamish about eyelids really shouldn't bother with this) there isn't anything daring enough to really shock a hardened filmgoer. The Haunting is a perfect Hallowe'en movie; designed to cause jolts and jumps in a very non-demanding way. But this certainly isn't a really, truly scary movie and is unlikely to draw acclaim for long after the final credits have rolled.

Summary: A dying teenager experiences supernatural visitations