Mar 27, 2009 12:00 am US/Eastern
'The Haunting in Connecticut'
By CHISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Critic
LOS ANGELES (AP) ―
The dead are angry, which manifests itself in the usual ways. Creaking floorboards, slamming doors, flickering lights — you've seen it all before, and it's all here again. In theory, you'd think they'd have time to come up with inventive ways to frighten us, being dead as they are.
The first feature from director Peter Cornwell offers more in the way of atmosphere than genuine scares, even as it plays up its supposedly based-on-a-true-story origins, "Amityville Horror"-style. Virginia Madsen, returning to trashy terror following her Oscar-nominated work in "Sideways," stars as Sara Campbell, who moves with her family to a rickety old Connecticut Victorian.
The goal was to be closer to the hospital where her teenage son, Matt (Robert Pattinson look-alike Kyle Gallner), has been receiving cancer treatments. Turns out the place used to be a funeral home, where all kinds of graphic, grody stuff was done to the corpses. (No wonder the rent was so cheap, Sara muses for an uncomfortable laugh.)
Working from a script by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe, Cornwell telegraphs too many of his scares — you know when you see a mirror that some apparition will show up — and the others are so repetitive, it's impossible not to see them coming.
Elias Koteas brings some understated substance, though, in the obligatory role of the priest who tries to rid the house of its pent-up spirits. PG-13 for some intense sequences of terror and disturbing images. 92 min. One and a half stars out of four.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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