Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2009

'Haunting in Connecticut' lacks sense, and terror

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

I appear to be stuck in a time warp.

Here it is 24 hours later, I'm still sick, and I'm seeing another generic movie that's more or less indistinguishable from every other movie just like it. Unless that's the fever talking and right now everything looks like a boring clone of something I've already seen, in which case I'd like some lead-jacketed medicine, please.

Until that arrives, I'm sticking with the time-warp theory. Doomed, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, to repeat this miserable day until I find true love — because, as we all know, when love begins, all your problems go away forever. Pardon my rambling: my brain is filled with viruses. On to The Haunting in Connecticut.

Virginia Madsen's son Kyle Gallner has cancer, but the real problem here is the all-night commute for his experimental treatments. Unable to take the strain on herself and Gallner, she temporarily relocates the family to a house in Connecticut.

The house has a history. Gallner starts seeing things — people, visions of the past, morbid rituals — but is afraid it's the side effects of his treatment, and if he tells, he'll have to stop. Meanwhile, his dad figures out the old home was once a mortuary.

Gallner's behavior looks like madness until the spirits of the house start coming for his younger siblings. With the help of reverend and fellow cancer-patient Elias Koteas, he'll try to cleanse the house of the forces that possess it.

The Haunting in Connecticut is based on a true story in the sense that someone, probably a crazy person, says it's true. Fine. I've said it before and I'll say it again: real life is stupid. It's confusing and it rarely adds up to anything. You're better off just making it up completely, because at least then you can put more naked people in it.

Here, the facts are both arbitrary and commonplace. Not that anyone who's ever seen The Exorcist needs help understanding paranormal technobabble such as "possessed" and "necromancy," but just in case you were born yesterday, Koteas exposits it so thoroughly he should be credited as "Greek Chorus."

Until he comes along to set the record straight, however, director Peter Cornwell burns several lifetimes goofing around with jump-out scares and violin stings. Consider me shat.

The Haunting also commits the No. 1 failure of horror movies: taking too long to explain the particulars of its supernatural proceedings. We're restless creatures who need ongoing logic to keep our attention. A series of disturbing images doesn't accumulate into anything meaningful; the 10th spooky silhouette doesn't make any more sense than the first.

Subset crime: inconsistency in its supernatural rules. OK, so seeing visions of the home's former owners, that I can buy. Grubs in the floorboards? Well, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but why not. Wait, now Gallner is being attacked by crabs? Sweet imagine, Mr. Cornwell, but I think that would have been more appropriate in the prequel, The Haunting in Chesapeake Bay.

Well, you can't expect too much attention to detail from a movie where a cancer-kid who pukes up everything he puts down is still built like a movie star. On the other hand, Gallner's bare pecs are critical once it comes time for some shirtless ghostbusting.

Honestly, thanks to an eye for the iconic, Cornwell pulls the finale into something fleetingly compelling. But in a story I gave up on long before that, without any real terror or the atmosphere that's so important to these films, The Haunting in Connecticut reads like the true story of a family that's seen too many bad movies.

Grade: C-