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Sinks or swims with the actors. Gallner makes a very convincing boy-about-to-die; Madsen is his properly stricken mom; and Donovan, an under-used leading man, plays the stressed, guilt-ridden dad well.
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Haunting tweaks familiar tropes enough to make them interesting. Just not so interesting as to inspire many nightmares after the credits roll.
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60Don't misunderstand: the proceedings are pretty silly, and the scares were a lot fresher back in 1979, when we first saw "The Amityville Horror." But Cornwell and his cast take things just seriously enough to keep us at least intermittently on edge.
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50A technically proficient horror movie and well acted.
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50The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.
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A tepid PG-13 iteration of the already lame 1979 genre classic "The Amityville Horror."
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50Although it's reasonably well-acted and offers a few certifiable jolts, feels awfully familiar.
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50You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.
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50Long on atmosphere yet short on dramatic tension.
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Smart enough to put much of its weight on Gallner, a lively presence with a terrifically sour mug that makes him look like a mutual cousin of Willem Dafoe and Peter Lorre.
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Part of what makes "Connecticut" oddly watchable even as it drags is the oil-and-water mix of acting styles of the leads. Virginia Madsen's refined naturalism is an awkward fit with the sharp mannerisms of Martin Donovan.
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40It loses steam once the wraiths become fully visible: they're just not scary enough.
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38Not very haunty.
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38A film that pays lip service to some interesting ideas, but is far too concerned with pleasing a large crowd to be anything more than another instantly forgettable fright flick.
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38Boring and uninspired, this movie gives ghost stories a bad name.
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33As a piece of storytelling, The Haunting In Connecticut is pretty lazy. As a horror movie, it's lazier still, bringing out every annoying shock-cut and disorienting sound-design trick of the last decade.
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In the realm of domestic horror, The Haunting in Connecticut is about as scary as a shower that suddenly changes temperature when someone flushes the toilet.
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30Gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.
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25Contains so many insults to the audience's intelligence.
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25There is still a great horror movie about foreclosure to be made. In the meantime, this movie plays games. (How many rounds of hide-and-seek should an audience tolerate?)
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25When the hits finally do come, they are really only capable of scaring 13-year-olds making their first trip into the horror genre.
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25C'mon, in matters of haunted-house inhabitation, settling into an ex-mortuary is like renting above a dentist's office -- ashen faces and ghastly screams come with the territory.
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11Koteas' overearnest performance almost makes The Haunting in Connecticut worth a look, but ultimately even the star of Cronenberg's "Crash" can't salvage what is essentially a substandard rip-off of "The Amityville Horror."
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 21
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Mixed: 5 out of 21
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Negative: 6 out of 21