THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT
RYAN: The only thing that’s going to give me nightmares about “The Haunting in Connecticut” is my regret that I saw it.
CAROLINE: Seriously. What a silly movie. It pains me that Virginia Madsen has stooped to this level.
RYAN: It’s a little bit scary but only by the manipulation of music and editing. There’s nothing terrifying about the theme and theory of this film.
CAROLINE: It’s supposedly based on a true story, but it’s so clear that they just took a story of a kid with cancer who lived in an old house that used to be a funeral home and turned it into a horror movie. I’m willing to bet than none of the stuff in the movie actually happened to the real-life kid. The movie made me jump once or twice, but even I, who can be very creeped out at horror flicks, wasn’t scared.
RYAN: Mostly it’s just gross. The special effects were like raw meat and squirty and disgusting. I feel like the kid’s cancer treatment was the scariest part of the film.
CAROLINE: I got bored, which is hard to do when you’re watching a scary movie. The story was just so lame. It was supposed to be really freaky but it didn’t work. I wouldn’t even call it a scary movie, just a gross movie.
RYAN: At one part toward the end, someone at the back of the theater yelled, “This is supposed to scare us!” and everyone laughed. Not a good sign. Usually movies about things that could happen or did happen in real life are the scariest, but this is just lazy film-making.
CAROLINE: The last line of the movie is laughably bad. The girl behind us, however, seemed to be into it. She was talking throughout the entire thing, speculating about what was about to happen, telling characters what to do, etc. It made me wonder if she’d ever seen a movie before.
RYAN: She was basically narrating the film for us, saying things that were about to happen and commenting on them after they happened. Thank you very little.
CAROLINE: Even her friend had to shush her after a while.
RYAN: I liked some of the flashback scenes; they were a little creepy and sepia-toned.
CAROLINE: They were OK, but mostly just gross and implausible.
— BOTTOM LINE —
RYAN: It’s a pretty crappy movie. It felt way longer than it actually was. A couple times I thought, “Is this really only 90 minutes long because it feels like forever?!” And it has those false endings where you think it’s ending but it keeps going and going. I just wanted to get out of the theater.
CAROLINE: I know! I thought it was over at one point, but there were twenty more minutes! I was dying. Even for horror fans, this movie is a waste of time.
— RATING —
