Matt Campbell (Kyle Gallner) has a terminal cancer and is submitted to an experimental treatment in the St. Michael's Hospital Goatswood in Connecticut. The responsible for the trial, Dr. Brooks (D.W. Brown),advises that if Matt starts seeing things, he should drop the experiment. His religious mother Sara (Virginia Madsen) drives almost eight hours with her son since he has nausea and needs to vomit during the travel. She proposes her husband Peter (Martin Donovan),who had trouble with booze, to rent a house in Connecticut to be close to the hospital despite their second mortgage. Sara finds an old house with an affordable price and she questions the catch to the owner and he explains that the house has a history, since it was a funeral home in the past. Sara hides the truth from Peter and the family moves to the house. While in the treatment, Matt befriends Reverend Popescu (Elias Koteas),who has also cancer. When Matt has weird visions and nightmares from the past, he calls Popescu that tells him that an evil entity is trapped in the house and they are able to see him because they are in the borderline of the worlds of the living and the dead.

"The Haunting in Connecticut" is an above average movie of haunted house since it blends a very well developed family drama with spooky scenes of a ghost story. There are many realist situations like the bad financial situation of the Campbells that are usually forgotten in American movies. Further, there is a beautiful message of faith, and Sara truly believes that God works in a mysterious way. The drinking problem of Peter and how it affected the relationship with Sara is just glanced and could be better explored. I do not like the sensationalism that highlights on the cover of the DVD that the story is based on a true event since this movie is better than that. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Evocando Espíritos" ("Evoking Spirits")

I hope that people who see The Haunting In Connecticut aren't put off from buying home just because it was a funeral parlor at one time. In fact back in the day it was common enough for undertakers to live on the premises. Of course not all of them were involved in all the occult stuff that the former owner of this place where the Campbell family has moved into.

Virginia Madsen, Martin Donovan and their kids have purchased an old funeral parlor in Connecticut and are moving there. Moving there because their oldest son Kyle Gallner is undergoing cancer treatments. That's bad enough, but Gallner is also psychic and when they move into their new home he starts seeing all kinds of apparitions and manifesting some truly frightful things.

The former owner of the funeral home used the dead and also used an adolescent kid who was also psychic as a medium and that kid who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It's quite a story when all is revealed.

Young Gallner carries this film, he gives a winning and sincere performance of a kid just not in control of all that's around him. There's another good performance by a minister played by Elias Koteas who has some idea of what's going on, but he too makes an almost fatal error for the Campbell family.

I'm not usually drawn to these films, but The Haunting In Connecticut is not a bad one for this genre.

THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT, a spook-house show crafted to crash in on the ever-present public appetite for ghost stories, single-handedly manages to cram in each and every haunted house cliché ever filmed and put it into just one movie. The storyline mixes slow-building suspense with dark and dank cellars, restless spirits, spooky seances, plenty of ectoplasm, possession, and everything else besides.

Sadly, despite the 'true story' tag, none of this ever rings true. Instead it comes across as a bland and soulless piece of money-making, a film in which the enjoyment factor is sucked dry from the outset. With major characters suffering from cancer and the rest suffering from a 'lack of personality' crisis, there's absolutely nothing to enjoy here and nothing we haven't seen before.

The narrative is so laboured and mundane that merely recounting it is a bore, while the whole haunted house genre has been handled much better more recently with the likes of MAMA and THE CONJURING (not great movies, either of them, but a darn sight better than this). A strangely wooden Virginia Madsen gives the dullest performance of her career, and even the reliable Elias Koteas can't improve things. Give it a miss.