The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)
A family moves into a rental home to put their cancer-stricken son Matt Campbell closer to the clinic where he is receiving experimental treatments. The boy is mentally disturbed by images in his head of the victims abused in the mortuary.Caught between economic realities and difficult emotional truths,they stay put even after discovering that their new house was once a funeral home also used for rituals to speak with the dead. For the most part, "The Haunting in Connecticut" relies not on gore but on mood and atmosphere. The house is treated like a character; plenty of ominous POVs a la Halloween, and every creak and moan from the floorboards feels scripted; which isn't always a bad thing. The acting here is pretty good: Virginia Madsen provides a solid emotional core as the struggling mother who refuses to let her son be taken by the cancer that is ravaging his body, but the real revelation in Kyle Gallner, best known as Veronica Mars's Beaver, who excels at drawing the audience into the escalating fear and madness as he battles for both his life and his soul. The story won't win awards for originality, or indeed plausibility, but this isn't the "Amityville Horror"-rip off that it could have been. It's rarely original, but never anything less that entertaining. And as for the scares, this easily tops the rest of the pile of recent horror films; with a steady rate of heart-freezing jump scares along with genuinely disturbing moments. Overall, I have mixed feelings about "The Haunting in Connecticut". It's got a vintage funeral parlor setting from horror movie heaven, some good acting, and a handful of spooky sequences. On the other hand, it does become predictable at times, the flashy special effects are a tad overdone, and a few aspects of the story are a bit hard to swallow.
- My Rating: 6.50/10
- Rotten Tomatoes: 18% (4.3/10)
- IMDb: 5.8/10
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