Sunday, March 29, 2009
A+E, Movies, Reviews

A-‘Haunting’ we will go

It’s ghosts vs. demons in the weekend’s other big face-off

BY STEVE WARREN

While monsters are battling aliens in the auditorium next door, there’s a contest between ghosts and demons being waged in the screenplay of “The Haunting in Connecticut.” The title suggests the ghosts won, but there’s a sequence that looks a lot like an exorcism (although the word is never used), starting with a shot of a clergyman approaching the house where a child has had frequent encounters with the former, long-dead occupants.

That movies today try to appeal to more than one demographic may explain the film’s multiple personalities. In addition to fans of both haunted-house and exorcism flicks, “The Haunting in Connecticut” entices Lifetime viewers with the story of a teenager with cancer and his mother, who fights fiercely to keep him alive.

Like every movie these days that’s not based on a comic book, this one is—all together now—“based on a true story,” even though it appears to be based on a dream inspired by watching “The Exorcist” and “The Amityville Horror” back to back. 

Kyle Gallner is very good as the alternately sweet, suffering, spooky and scary Matt Campbell. Sara (Virginia Madsen), his mother, has been driving him up from Manhattan for cancer treatments at St. Michael’s Hospital in Goatswood, Conn. The drive is a strain on both of them, so even though her husband, Peter (Martin Donovan), a recovering alcoholic, needs every penny for his contracting business, Sara rents a house near the hospital when Matt qualifies for an experimental protocol.

The landlord fails to mention that he’s offering such a good deal because the house used to be a funeral home, but that becomes apparent soon enough. The first part of the film focuses on Matt and his illness, segueing gradually into the ghostly stuff, because at first it seems Matt’s medication may be causing dreams and hallucinations.

There are false alarms for the audience, too, and it’s often hard to separate the incidental music and sound effects from the noises Matt’s actually supposed to be hearing. No cats leap into the frame, but several other standard cheap ploys are used to make you jump.

When the rest of the family starts sharing Matt’s visions, they begin to take him seriously. His cousin Wendy (Amanda Crew) researches the house’s history and learns the original owner, Ramsey Aickman (John Bluethner), used to hold séances there with his young assistant, Jonah (Erik Berg), as the medium.

Other historical revelations explain why the spirits may be restless, but in the meantime Matt has met a fellow cancer patient, Rev. Popescu (Elias Koteas), who says it’s because he’s so close to death that Matt is more easily reached from the other side. It’s Popescu who comes to the house to do the unlabeled exorcism, acting like it’s an everyday occurrence but still not getting it quite right.

The climax involves a lot of desecrated corpses that have been around for 60 years or more without rotting. This seems a little odd, but hey, it’s “based on a true story.”

“The Haunting in Connecticut” makes the audience jump on cue, but it’s not really very scary. Well-produced and generally well-acted, it seems to have its heart in the personal story of the mother and son, including the horror elements out of commercial necessity. 2.5 STARS