I suspect the audience for The Haunting in Connecticut is mainly people who are planning to break up with their spouses or significant others. They absolutely insist on skipping Knowing (intelligent) or I Love You, Man (funny) for this, something incredibly stupid and only unintentionally funny. Lemme 'splain.
We meet Matt Campbell, a teenager dying of cancer and undergoing an experimental radiation treatment in a hospital that seems to be about 8000 miles from his home. That being quite the commute, his parents, Sara and Peter (Virginia Madsen and Martin Donovan) decide to find a home closer to the hospital and, apparently, figured the best possible place would be some abandoned, drafty house filled with dust and rat feces, just the place you'd want to bring someone in poor health. To make sure he's in the grave ASAP, Mom accedes to the kid's desire to let him sleep in the basement that not only has exposed insulation but also a really creepy looking room with windows that seem to have been intentionally stained with dung that they can't get into. At this point, I must reveal a spoiler: THE HOUSE IS HAUNTED. Yep, sorry if knowing that ruins your enjoyment of the film.
At first, only Matt sees the ghosts and it's chalked up to a side effect of his cancer treatment. When plates start flying across the room, lights go off and on by themselves and that creepy locked door opens all by itself, that is also pretty much chalked up to side effects from Matt's cancer treatment. When that door opens, we discover that the house used to be a funeral home. When you add that information to the disturbing dreams Matt has been having about a man desecrating corpses with black magicky looking symbols while some scared kid looks on, the audience now knows for sure that the house is full of pissed off ghosts and any resident of the house will be treated the same way as someone who dug up their corpses and had sex with them.
Matt meets a fellow cancer patient named Reverend Popescu (Elias Koteas) who assures him that it's perfectly normal for people with life threatening illnesses to see dead people baking casseroles and watching American Idol or whatever the hell it is dead people do and that all those stupid healthy people just can't understand which made me think, "Oh great, yet another reason not to get cancer. Guess I'd better eat healthier."
Up until now, the movie's just been dull and below average. Most of the scares come from things suddenly jumping out of the dark and saying BOO. There does, however, come a point where every member of the Campbell family becomes thoroughly and undeniably convinced that they're in a haunted house and that is where it gets oh so very stupid. Do they leave? OH, WHY THE HELL WOULD THEY DO THAT? In fact, Wendy, the Campbell's pretty niece who lives with them, didn't think that the ghosts shaking the hell out of the house and carving up Matt's body with necromantic runes was a reason not to strip and get in the shower where OH MY GOD SHE'S ATTACKED BY GHOSTS. Despite the fact that Wendy had done jack up until the point in the movie where she got wet and naked, I'm sure this scene wasn't meant to be the least bit exploitative.
As you can see, if you wanted someone to break up with you, insisting that they accompany you to Haunting is a great way to do it. After the movie is over, talk enthusiastically about how you just can't wait till it comes out on DVD so that you two can watch it again and again as well as whatever was considered to be too bad to show in theaters but is now immortalized in the Deleted Scenes section.
Fun fact that really has nothing to do with the movie's quality but does serve as the bread of this crap sandwich: the film still claims to be "Based On A True Story," a marketing gimmick I've already dealt with in a previous post. I would say that Monsters Vs. Aliens is probably more grounded in reality than Haunting. In fact, the movie bears little resemblance to the claims made by the people who originally wrote the book. Here is a good debunking of the actual story. Next week, I'll debunk Monsters Vs. Aliens (sneak peak: it was really Demons who fought the Aliens).
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