THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT - caveat emptor

THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT is a very tame, very workmanlike horror movie. A family crippled by medical bills rents a house near the hospital where the teenage son is being treated for cancer. Mum is willing to overlook the fact that it used to be a mortuary because the rent is cheap. The kidmstarts hallucinating: turns out the old inhabitants were binding spirits and said spirits are mad. Medium-bad things ensue (after all, this movie is rated 15 not 18).

The production values are just fine, and the movie benefits from above-average horror casting with Virginia Madsen as the desperate mother, Martin Donovan as the falling-off-the-bandwagon father and Elias Koteas as the priest with the magnetic (don't ask) crucifix. The problems are the same as with all haunted-house horror: why don't the family just leave the house? On top of that, why did the previous owners go to all that trouble? It doesn't seem to me that they got much reward for their labours. Two simple rules of economics might have saved all parties a lot of bother: cost-benefit analysis and the price revelation mechanism.

THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT is on release in the UK and US. It opens on April 17th in Brazil and Iceland; in Sweden on April 24th; in the Netherlands on April 30th and in Finland on July 3rd.

SEX DRIVE - piss-poor alleged comedy aimed firmly at the horny teen demographic.

SEX DRIVE is the kind of film that makes me grateful that I grew up laughing cheekily at flicks like FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and WEIRD SCIENCE - teen comedies that actually bothered to develop characters and crack jokes rather than just string together a bunch of boob shots, jizz jokes and gay taunts. Seriously, debut writer-director Sean Anders should be ashamed of having put together such a lazy, derivative movie. There are no laugh-out-loud moments. No deep and abiding truths. No flashes of sentimentality underneath all the crass vulgarity.

The plot, for what it's worth, sees a geeky, horny teen called Ian (Josh Zuckerman) steal a sweet car from his elder brother (James Marsden) and drive cross country to bang a chick he met on line. He takes along his highly sexed best friend Lance (Clark Duke) and best friend Felicia (Amanda Crew). On route, they encounter the regulation slack-jawed yokels and, why not?!, horny Amish people. The only truly comedic performance is from Seth Green.

SEX DRIVE was released in 2008 in the Netherlands, Iceland, the US, Belgium, Greece, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Turkey and Estonia. It is currently on release in Croatia, Argentina and the UK. It goes on release in Brazil on January 16th; in New Zealand on February 5th; in the Czech Republic on March 12th; in Slovakia on March 19th; and in Germany on March 26th.