The Haunting in Connecticut managed to rake in the cash on its opening weekend. The lure of a spooky movie about a real life haunted house proved too much for many people but if you missed it on the big screen don’t worry you didn’t miss much. Sadly this was another generic horror packed with trick jumps and ghosts lurking in the background of shots.

The basic premise focuses on a young man named Matt who is undergoing treatment for cancer. He has to travel miles from his home to get to the specialist he is seeing. After an especially arduous night of stoppages and exhaustion his mother, Sara, decides enough is enough. They rent a house near the hospital and she decides to stay with him until the rest of the family can join them. The problem is they are short on cash so finding a house within budget is liable to be tough. In the end they manage to find an impressively large house and strike a deal with the owner. Of course there is a massive catch, the house used to be a mortuary and it is now filled with malevolent spectres.

Events move at a fairly ponderous pace and the glimpses of spookiness are terribly clichéd. They play a little with the idea that Matt is going crazy and there are a few poltergeist style manoeuvres which he gets the blame for. If they had developed this line it might have been quite good but they rejected it in favour of the usual collection of lame fake scares and ghostly apparitions.

The cast is actually pretty good and Kyle Gallner as Matt and Virginia Madsen as Sara both turned in solid performances. Martin Donovan played the beleaguered father, Peter. The familiar face of Elias Koteas popped up as the Reverend Popescu and definitely bagged the most irritating character of the film award.

The supposedly true story that this is based on concerns a family who reported finding mortuary equipment in a house they moved into. They claimed to see demons in the house and hear the noises of coffins coming up through a trap door in the bedroom floor. According to them the house was cleared after a séance in 1988 and then later knocked down and rebuilt.

The film makers take some elements of this tale and weave in a load of nonsensical twists and turns which build towards one of the worst horror film endings ever. The director, Peter Cornwell doesn’t have much of a track record and he relies of tested and true techniques in this film. Of course another way of putting that is that he conforms to genre formula all the way and this makes for boring viewing.

The Haunting in Connecticut is like an amalgam of various horror films. It borrows from The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist and Poltergeist but is nowhere near as good as any of them. The story gets increasingly daft as the film progresses and the scare techniques used are just too familiar to have an impact. In the end it fell well short of its potential.