Just because the "true story" on which a horror film is based doesn't pass the nonsense test is no reason, in itself, to dismiss the movie. (Consider "The Exorcist.") "The Haunting in Connecticut," however, offers reasons of its own. What we have here is a simple haunted-house flick, pure and silly. Demons lurk and loom, characters make straight for the cellar stairs leading down into darkness, and every time a reflective surface comes into view, you know with a sigh of certainty that some spectral presence will soon be glimpsed in it: Boo!
What the picture does have going for it is a better cast than you'd expect, and some effective shocks and scenes of shivery dread. The story has been trimmed of the more preposterous elements of the "real" haunting, which took place, if that could actually be said, in a Hartford suburb in the mid-1980s. Now we have out-of-towners Pete and Sara Campbell (Martin Donovan and Virginia Madsen, horror vets both) moving into a spooky old house in order to be close to the hospital where their son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is undergoing cancer therapy. Also on hand, for reasons entirely clear to the writers, perhaps, are Sara's niece, Wendy (Amanda Crew), and Wendy's two cute little kids (Sophi Knight and Ty Wood).
