The Haunting in Connecticut

Director: Peter Cornwall
Writer: Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe
Photographer: Adam Swica
Score: Robert J. Kral
Cast: Virginia Madsen, Elias Koteas, Martin Donovan, Kyle "Billie Joe Armstrong" Gallner, Amanda Krew, Sophie Knight, Ty Wood.

Sunday, I couldn't find a date for the show--as my bruher mysteriously lost his phone between the hours of 1:30 and 4:15 (just like he has for the past three Sundays)--so I decided to stag. I'd been wanting to see The Haunting in Connecticut for since it opened and stuff, but my wife wouldn't go with me 'cause she wouldn't let me take the kids with us (even though I told her we could just cover their eyes and ears when the scary parts--or most of 'em (hee hee!)--came). I decided then just to go by myself.

And then it rained. Cats and frogs it rained, almost like I was watching a rerun of Katrina or something, it rained. My wife and the childs left to go to my in-laws, but it was raining too hard for me to go to the movies...and then it stopped! Poof! It was gone! I jumped in the Jeep and raced to the theater, but by the time I got there it was 2 and the line was twofold and about twenty people deep each line and so I said, "Yeah, right! As if!" and came home and went to the bathroom and next thing I know it it's 4:15 and I go to the theater and this time I get in ontime and I get my popcorn and Dew and I walk in the theater and there are two of my students and one of them the guy tells me to shut up and drink my beer and I'm thinking, "Yeah...he's my student alright," 'cause that made no since, even if the back of my shirt said it or not and stuff.

Okay, now, here comes the movie, and here's one of the first lines:

"You never plan on having a child with cancer," mom Virginia Madsen tells her hubby Martin Donovon about their teenage son, Kyle "Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong Is My Idol" Gallner, and Gallner overhears. Whoah, dude! Way to saddle a cheap horror movie with emotional baggage so early on! What kind of movie did these filmmakers think they were making, anyway? It's a horror movie, right? Where are the jump scares? The totality of night shots even when it's day? The young child in danger? The blood? The near-sex scenes? Where I ask you? How am I supposed to be scared when all I'm thinking about is this family's personal turmoil and Gallner's eyeshadow? The one teenage chick in the movie never even attempts to look sexy or come on to her cousin, and where's the fun in that? Madsen--a hotty for over twenty years now--never even bares any cleavage! WTF?

Okay, sure, we're given a few jolts, a few stingers here and there, a few "Oh snap! He's behind you!" and "Oh snap! What was that shadow?" moments, but the out-and-out startles and boo moments and high-pitched screams and murdering fiends and ZOM-BAYs and obscured ghosteses and spooky Asian broads with long stringy hair give way to character development and sub-plot development and actual acting. Who wants this, people? It's a modern-day horror movie; it's not supposed to be some stuffy period piece (and hey, since it's set in the '80s, where are all the pop-culture tee shirts and hair dos? Huh?) about the pall that death and cancer can hang over an entire family, about how fear can develop into neurosis and neurosis into depression and depression into hallucinations and voices.

Horror movies nowadays (yeah, if ever) aren't supposed to make us think, doggonit. If I wanted to think, I'd have read a book, but no...I had to see this movie, and I had to think, and I had to care about the stupid characters, and I had to stop myself from crying over Virginia Madsen's heartbreak and grief, and who wants to cry at a horror movie? Not I, said the fly. Speaking of The Fly (the Jeff Goldblum, David Cronenberg version), where was the gore? The guts? You know what we get instead? Ectoplasm. Manifestations of evil. I mean, we don't even see, like, dead bodies--not any significant ones anyway--until the very end. Where's the fun? I want mortification!

I mean--and this is the last one, really it is--people...it's a haunted house movie. The ghosts? Where were they? The possession? Where was the head-turning? Where was the bodies banging against the wall? All you give is are a few doors opening and shutting and plates falling on the floor? Really? What year is this? 2009! It's 2009, not 1929!

Okay, okay, there is that creepy guy with the glasses, and that one scene in the bedroom, with Madsen in the dark, about 2/3 of the way through. That scene was great! Everybody in the theater screamed (but me...I laughed at 'em all!)! What we needed was more of that! See...these filmmakers aren't stoopid; they know how to make us jump. They're just dull and intellectual and hippies and communists and Puritans (where's the Virginia Madsen skin, huh?), and they don't belong making films in America. They need to be shipped to like Australia or something, making movies for those Albino people over there, you know, the natives that live in the land Down Under where women go with the thunder! Those Albinians might be scared at this, might like this, because their lives are all boring and stuff anyway, just spear the rabbit, spear the rabbit, spear the rabbit! (and the kangaroo! and the koala!).

True story? Right. The only true story is that I made it out of there without falling asleep. I think it's still playing in town, too. But if you decide to go see it, then don't say I didn't warn ya!