Only a movie with so generic a title as The Haunting in Connecticut could spawn such a generic movie as The Haunting in Connecticut. There’s all the usual haunted house highlights in this one: gross out gags, psychic kids, a helpful preacher and a gratuitous shower scene that’s not really that gratuitous. The sad part is that Haunting seems to be working overtime to win us over. From a production standpoint, the film is excellent and actually kind of scary in places. But whoever adapted this apparently “based on a true story” story just seemed to go down the haunted house checklist without much effort, or shame.

The story focuses on young Matt (Kyle Gallner), who’s battling a serious bout of cancer. With his strength zapped and being exhausted from the treatments, his mother (Virgina Madsen) wants to temporarily relocate the family closer to the treatment facility. Reluctantly, the dad (Martin Donovan) agrees, despite the fact that it’ll be a financial strain on the family. Dear, old, gullible mom finds a big, century house for dirt cheap to rent, which should easily be a parable for the old adage if it seems too good to be true, it probably is; it’s the universal sign of a haunted house. Anyway, the family’s not there for long until some strange stuff starts going down.

I like the back story in the film about how the house used to be a funeral parlour where a mad mortician would exploit a young boy’s gifts as a psychic medium. Not only was the story interesting, but it was revealed in a very well-paced and well thought manner, and director Peter Cornwell put a lot of flare into these sequences. Unfortunately when you find the exposition more engaging than the characters at the centre of the story, you know you have a problem. As stated above, the film is stock-a-block full of haunted house clichés and stuff that even Vincent Price would have thought of as tacky. Take The Amityville Horror, add a pinch of The Shining and a helping of The Exorcist and you’ve got the basic recipe for Haunting.

Horror veteran Madsen gets points for being a trooper and actually working through the emotions, but I have a feeling that she was unfavourably flashing back to her pre-Sideways days in direct-to-video schlock, just like this could have/should have been. And unfortunately for Gallner, he can’t play creepy and disturbed; his range seems only limited to emo and annoying. Where’s Haley Joel Osment when you need him? Donovan gets shafted as the dad, because even though he gets to play the struggling alcoholic card in his acting repertoire that plot thread goes no where fast. Only Elias Koteas seems to escape with his dignity intact as the knowing priest.

The main problem though is that very few movies actually fall right on the 50 yard line being neither bad enough to be called so, or just good enough to be maybe worth seeing. This one’s a tough call, I have to admit. There’s a substantive portion of the film that I like, but the rest seriously bothered me with its mediocrity. If the casting had been better, this might have been a pass; if the story were a little more original, this might have gotten a pass; or if this hadn’t have been another accursed of “based on actual events” piece of clap trap, it might have been a pass. Why does everything now have to be based on true events? Does nobody think of anything original anymore?

Don’t answer that. I suppose it could have been worse… It could have been based on a true story that was turned into a movie called “The Haunting in Kyoto.” So, there is a bright side.