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Haunting In Connecticut (The)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Lions Gate Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (14th September 2009). |
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The Film
 Ghosts are spooky. Old ghosts in a new house? Extra Spooky. Shadows and mirrors? Spooktacular. Too many supernatural movies just rely on the idea of spooky ghosts to pass as terrifying, making them appear or disappear in random places without any real rhyme or reason, making sure that they disappear quickly after being seen. This sort of ghoulish behavior doesn’t come across as anything scary, just jumpy and gimmicky after a few quick scares. When you base a ghost movie off a supposed true story, it’s supposed to help increase the "haunt factor", but only if the movie could be reasonably considered spooky. It takes much more than jumps and scares to really get into people’s heads for an hour and a half, but recognizing that you don’t need to take it totally seriously can be a fun time. “The Haunting in Connecticut” (2009) doesn’t know how to do either, but still performed well in the boxoffice (sadly outperforming “Drag Me to Hell” (2009), a PG-13 horror movie that knew how to be smart and funny). Purportedly based on a true story, “The Haunting in Connecticut” follows the Campbell family trying to deal with their oldest son, Matt (Kyle Gallner) trying to deal with cancer. In order to bring him closer to the hospital his mother Sara (Virginia Madsen) purchases a house on her way home from the hospital. She doesn’t really take the time to investigate, but after moving her family in Matt starts seeing some strange things, plates disappearing, strange ghostly figures in the reflection of his room. After some investigating and a few days, Matt discovers that his basement bedroom was formerly a mortuary and the entire house used to be a funeral home, used for occult activites by the former owner and his assistant Jonah (Erik Berg). Even though the film begins with some weird old photos of dead people and short clips of embalming people, the movie is terribly, horribly slow and reliant upon the spook factors being scary. Ghosts and ghouls of the movie don’t really terrify, so much as pop-up and flash some lights, not bringing much entertainment. There are a bunch of little scares with mirrors and shadows and the typical jumps, but with the story and the drama of the cancer that tries to go through the movie, along with the hallucinations, it all falls apart since it lacks any real horror element to it other than ghosts and blood. There’s also an exorcism subplot that’s not realy exorcism so much as a reverend coming to grab some remains, but the thematic Christian undertones are a little unsettling for me and feel really out of place throughout the entire film. Now that the movie has tragically failed to impress with the horror element, maybe the actors can save it. After all, with a big name like Virginia Madsen leading the cast you would think you could pull a performance out, but either they took weird takes of her scenes or the director doesn’t know how to pull the right performance out of her. The supporting cast isn’t much help either, all of the scenes with Matt in very pale makeup make him look like a wannabe from “Twilight” (2008). Their reactions to the haunts and ghouls are under acted and they seem fairly disinterested for good stretches of the film. The subplot between Sara and her husband Peter (Martin Donovan) really gets lost in the larger scope of the film, aside from a hilariously bad montage of him playing guitar and her crying. Between the creeky stairs, the shadows, spooky noises and spooky mops that show up in the film, there isn’t much there to scare, and just about as much to entertain. Peter Cornwell’s directing is purely functional, moving the story from scene-to-scream, but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods. I had hoped the haunt scenes would give in to some weird directing or creative movement, but you never get much more than a zoom or a weird angle to allow for another jump shot. For some reason supposed real life haunting stories make bundles of money. But I think it’s more because they’re solid date movies for the 13-21 demographic. Can’t go to a bar on a date, might as well try spooking them into your arms with spooks, ghouls, ghosts and other haunts. These movies can be fun and entertaining, but this one is just boring. It really reminded me of the trainwreck that was “An American Haunting” (2006) in terms of the ability it had to make money on a bad plot, bad acting, and overall bad movie that can’t even be so bad it’s fun. A better story could have been about the writer who was supposed to write a book on the 'story' it’s based on who was told that he should just “make up” facts to cover up any story inconsistencies and “write it scary.” That sounds like a comedy I would see. There are two versions of the film on this disc, the original "Theatrical" cut and an "Unrated" extended version of the film. Plus the movie uses papyrus for the titles and credits. Honestly. Let this font die.
Video
Presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio in 1080p 24/fps with AVC MPEG-4 encoding, the film may be an example of the superior technology of Blu-ray overwhelming the original filming. The interior lighting ranges from good to terrible, bringing an inconsistently grainy feel to the film, giving the huse of black and grey an inconsistent feel, something that can totally break a horror movie. Reds and the rest of the colors come up fine, but the inconsistent black levels are terrible. The images in low lighting aren’t terribly sharp where contrast is supposed to exist, making for a shoddy transfer from the original film.
Audio
The audio fares a bit better in the English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit, but is another example of the quality of the disc being greater than the original product. The music and ambient jump noises come through clearly, and are adequately mixed for the presentation of the film, but the score that will occasionally come up (especially during the library research scene) sound like they were ripped out of garage band. Understandable on a micro-budget or student film, but with a studio production like this it’s really unacceptable. There are also English and Spanish subtitles on both versions of the film, while the "Theatrical" version has an additional French 5.1 Dolby Digital track.
Extras
I didn’t believe in ghosts before seeing the movie, but just before watching it I experienced a haunting of my own: the disc for the film has known loading issues and sometimes will just flash the spooky house loading screen for a really long time. Sometimes you have to restart, sometimes just sit through it and let it load. Once the haunting begins, there’s a fair amount of special features including two versions of the film, four featurettes, deleted scenes, two audio commentaries, a theatrical trailer and bonus trailers. Plus a second disc which features a digital copy of the film. DISC ONE: The two audio commentaries both run only on the "Unrated" extended version of the film. The first audio commentary is with director Peter Cornwell, producer Andy Trapani, screenwriter Adam Simon and editor Tom Elkins acts as the technical commentary for the film, going into the writing process, basing the movie off of the Discovery Channel show. There are far too many pauses in the commentary, a few jokey lines about making Canada look like Connecticut. All the talk of authenticity to the period or ghost stories are a little ridiculous, but overall the commentary is informative and boring. Tragically, slowly moving, monotonously boring. The second audio commentary features director Peter Cornwell and actors Virginia Madsen and Kyle Gallner. Cornwell carries over a few points from the previous commentary; Madsen and Gallner react to the movie, as well as make conversation about Chicago (Madsen’s home town). Madsen talks about her kids’ reaction to the movie, her iPhone and how well the movie works. They have an inconceivable level of awe for the film and the movie making process. They manage to praise each other and the actors well enough, harsh on the crabs, and just generally talk about the movie. Not interesting, not too entertaining. “Two Dead Boys: The Making of ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’” runs for 14 minutes and 36 seconds. This first featurette talks with the major players in the movie, their beliefs in ghosts, how much scary the movie is than “The Amityville Horror” (2005). It’s funny that they try to back the truth of the original story, claiming the family was very protective of the story and making the true events into a film, though considering they had the story turned into a book, a tv episode and a feature film, the family doesn’t seem that uneager to keep the supposed haunting private. Whatever drama the director and the producers think is there is a little ridiculous. “The Fear is Real: Reinvestigating the Haunting” is a bigger featurette broken down into 2 parts, running together for 41 minutes and 46 seconds. These two featurettes utilize spooky lighting and continues the use the horrible, abysmal, gut wrenching, vomit inducing papyrus font: - “Part I” runs for 16 minutes and 30 seconds and covers the basic background of the story, even talking about the house and the original home. It’s kinda interesting hearing about the house and living in an old funeral home, but the way the entire featurette is shot with candlelight makes the entire thing seem like a fake or a mockumentary. - “Part II” runs for 25 minutes and 16 seconds. This section of the featurette explains a lot of the catholic overtones of the family, and thus the film, as well as the different stories these people are telling. Now some psychic investigators are brought in, but the way the different scenes in the featurette are spliced with the scenes from the movie makes it all seem even more fake. They confront some of the points about the author who wrote the book about their apparent haunting, but they mostly just debase his character. There’s more talk of the ecorcism, but even if their story seemed true, the way the featurette is put together with scenes from the movie (even with some photos and artifacts) it just seems more like a fake. “Anatomy of a Haunting” runs for 12 minutes and 17 seconds. Another featurette (or fear-turette) brings a load of psychics and other paranormal people into the ghoulish world of ghosts with candlelit interviews. A long featurette about ghosts, and how they think they are true. If you don’t believe in ghosts it’s laughable and really slow (meaning it’s jokey enough to laugh at the thought of but not to watch the whole way through), but if you do believe in ghosts maybe you’ll be entertained. “Memento Mori: The History of Post-Mortem Photography” runs for 10 minutes and 59 seconds and might be the most factual or interesting featurette on the disc, dealing with the history of the photography of the dead. Speaking with Stanley B. Burns, who has apparently published a book on memorial photography, the featurette talks about memorial photography that emerged after the growth of the camera. An interesting idea for the first couple of minutes, but lasting out the full 10 will take some endurance. The deleted scenes are all put together into one long segment, with optional audio commentary from director Peter Cornwell. In all the scenes run for 8 minutes and 32 seconds. The first scene talks about the graveyard and what the relationship between Wendy (Amanda Crew) and the rest of the cast was. Cornwall talks about the improvement it makes to the film, even though cutting it out makes things make less sense. Then Popescu and Matt talk about religion and his wife. Cornwall just describes the scene, and says the shot was tricky. Sara apparently works in a convenience store, she gets freaked out, finds Matt trying to burn down the house. Cornwall talks about liking the scene, acknowledges that establishes plot elements. Matt plays catch with Billy, he freaks out. Cornwall talks about the scene isolating Matt. Mary plays with dolls, a spooky ghost appears, Cornwall talks about cutting it for time. Billy plays with the eyeball, it gets scary, Cornwall says it’s unnecessary. The theatrical trailer for the film which runs for 2 minutes and 28 seconds. Bonus trailers are for: - “My Bloody Valentine 3D” runs for 1 minute 25 seconds. - “The Eye” runs 2 minutes and 10 seconds. - “Cabin Fever” runs for 1 minute and 30 seconds. There is also an “LG Live” BD-Live feature that requires a profile 2.0 player and an internet connection, you can download some widgets and trailers from the Lionsgate online portal. DISC TWO: This disc is simply a digital copy of the film.
Overall
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