Haunt Not Want Not

Another House Bites the Dust
By
Morgan P Salvo
1 star

Just for the record, my theory stands strong that if a movie has the word “haunting” in the title, it’s not going to be good. Add to that if it’s “based on a true story” then it can only go so far. Suffice it to say this movie is doomed from the start. Based on the documented 1986 paranormal happenings to the Campbell family, The Haunting of Connecticut’s truth is stretched like taffy. There’s nothing new here. Haunting is one heckuva tired old genre, even with beefed up hyper-kinetic special effects to mask the absolute emptiness of the action on the screen.
The plot goes something like this: a family in turmoil…Mom (Virginia Madsen) is a big Christian, Dad (Martin Donovan) is a big drunk and son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is dying of cancer. Three other kids kick around too. They buy a house on a whim to avoid long drives for rigorous cancer treatments. The house is a bargain but has a “history”—turns out that it was a funeral parlor in which séances were conducted to raise the dead. Now the dead want revenge or possession of a soul or something. In other words the house is ummm…haunted.
The performances are good but the dialogue is hollow. Madsen is too natural in enduring her situation to be believable, and Donavan is too exacting in his indecisiveness. They make an oddly matched couple (also not believable). Gallner does a good job of showing fear, disgust, pain and demonic glee when in the throes of hallucinations and/or being possessed. Elias Koteas (a supremely underrated actor) does the best job as Reverend Popescu who is also dying and being treated for cancer. He has no special powers to combat the ghosts; just dedication, patience, tolerance and a streak of nihilism.

The ideas are far-fetched yet almost cool. Add ghosts to an already tragic family drama, mix in a macabre funeral parlor, an evil embalming room, some bad grave sites, mediums barfing up ectoplasm, body engraving and séances and we should be off and running. Toss in the revelation that only when you are close to death can you see the dead, and you could have a tag line right up there with “I see dead people”. Unfortunately there is just too much going on, with one overbearing dramatic, traumatic scene after another. There is a hilariously bad tell-all “parents-in-crisis” montage wherein Dad plays guitar and slugs vodka till he pulls a Nirvana /Who moment smashing his practice Squire guitar while Mom prays like crazy to get her son back, juxtaposed with shots cutting back and forth to more ominous creepiness attacking Matt and his pummeled psyche.

First-time tackling a feature, director Peter Cornwall makes it look good with grainy dark hues but then fuses too many ideas, unable to choreograph flashbacks with real time, turning everything into an extended mess. Chucking all his tricks in a blender to rattle around, he telegraphs his scares to the point where nothing is a surprise and uses no technique you haven’t seen before, such as having the kids play Hide and Seek to set up the audience for more cheap scares. The only weird originality is the satanic ritual of tattooing sayings onto soon-to-be dead bodies in a Memento style of writing to ward off evil. Some unintentionally funny scenes include blood-mopping, a pillar of guts and maggots, black-crabs dancing and last but not least, a box of eye-lids.
Two especially ludicrous things: it seems the definition of necromancy has been downgraded to “corpse bothering” and apparently ghosts can cure cancer.
The problem with haunted houses, demonic possession or tapping into the paranormal is you have to believe. I want to believe, but the amount of gunk this movie musters up makes it an uphill battle. With it trying so hard to fit in the “based on a true story/haunted house” genre, this movie takes a back plot in the cul-de-sac behind Amityville and Hill House, and alongside every other movie that contains the word HAUNTING in its title.

The Haunting in Connecticut
Starring: Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas
Directed by: Peter Cornwell