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.
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