movie review by brandon: the haunting in connecticut

*1/2 out of *****

About 70 bazillion horror movies come out each year, and maybe 1 or 2 are any good. And by "any good" I mean usually mediocre, but at least you don't want to pull your guts out with your bare hands to stop the pain. Once in a great while you get something like The Orphanage. Predictably, The Haunting in Connecticut isn't The Orphanage. It's not even A Nightmare on Elm Street Part V.

Virginia Madsen, who apparently turned her Sideways comeback into a career of moms and wives in bad genre movies, plays a mom and wife who moves her family to a creepy house in order to be closer to her son's cancer treatment center. But it used to be a mortuary, where an evil undertaker held séances, carved runes into dead bodies, and cut off eyelids for apparently no reason (the movie can't even be bothered to give us one).

Soon, the hauntings start. And by hauntings, I mean indistinct black figures in mirrors while loud strings and trumpets go "DEH!" The cancer kid starts hallucinating fuzzy and heavily edited hallucinations about séances. At one point ectoplasm is brought up, but I think only so there could be a movie poster where brown stuff comes out of a kid's mouth because the ectoplasm (a genuinely creepy idea) is dropped as soon as it comes out of the kid's mouth and explodes.

That's right, this is the kind of movie where a brown, poopy substance coming from a child's mouth isn't creepy enough. It has to EXPLODE. Did Michael Bay direct that scene?

Needless to say, there are no scares in this movie. Rather than try and write any, they fall back on every single cliché that every single horror movie has been using for the last 5 years. I didn't count, but in the first half-hour it seemed there were at least 30 times a loud sting of music accompanied a figure in a mirror.

So basically the audience is cheated. Why introduce a box of human eyelids and NEVER use it for anything other than a quick "ew"?. Or the "based on true events" tag line that horror films love to tack onto their promotional materials, even though the movie in now way resembles any of the supposedly true events. The guy who wrote the book, upon discovering that the family's stories all contradicted each other, was told by the "paranormal investigators" Ed and Lorraine Warren to make the entire story up.

Not that the movie in any way resembles the fictional book. That would involve actually doing something that hasn't been done in a shit horror movie before. So the hauntings aren't scary, the mystery never involving, the writing and direction just puked upon the screen. Every horror scene is so choppy and edit-heavy that I thought Jason Bourne was going to jump on screen and karate fight the ghosts.

It's the kind of movie that really infuriates me, where the filmmakers can barely disguise their contempt for the audience. Seriously, people, can we stop giving these pricks our money and demand something worth a damn?