Do Not Watch This Movie

This weekend, I had the misfortune of watching The Haunting in Connecticut. Instead of trying to explain just how horrible this movie is, I shall provide a succinct summary of the plot in five easy steps, and let you decide for yourself:

1. The words “Based On A True Story” flash on the screen. Uh-oh. Meet the family: Mom, Alcoholic Dad, Teenage Kid With Cancer (aka. Beaver from Veronica Mars), Attractive Sister, and Random Kids Who Aren’t Important. The whole family is poor because they have to have to pay for Cancer Kid’s cancer treatments, so they move into a big scary house that used to be a funeral home. For some reason, Cancer Kid decides it would be a good idea to make the torture chamber/room where they used to chop up dead bodies into his bedroom.

2. Cancer Kid sees a ghost and has visions. Him and Attractive Sister find some photos of weird shit. They do research (on a microfiche reader!) and find out that the house used to be owned by a crazy man. Presumably, the existence of the torture chamber did not give this away already. Cancer Kid says creepy nursery rhymes, and there are lots of scenes where loud music alternates with silence, lights flicker, and images flash on the screen. This is all very scary. At least, it would be if you could put the movie in a time machine and send it back to 1985, before everyone had seen these cheap scare techniques in hundreds of other movies.

3. Cancer Kid and Attractive Sister meet a creepy man who knows about ghosts, and comes across like he should probably be on the National Sex Offender Registry. At this point, I am so bored that I start checking my email on cellphone. The kids invite Creepy Ghost Man over to exorcise the ghost. The house goes wild, with doors slamming and lights exploding, just like in Poltergeist and every other haunted house movie ever made. For some reason, the whole family sits there huddling in terror instead of just walking the fuck out the front door, which is wide open. Yay, Creepy Ghost Man completes the exorcism! Nobody dies. The End!!! OR IS IT???

4. No!!! Creepy Ghost Man has made a huge mistake. There are hundreds of other ghosts in the house. The ghost he got rid of was actually a good ghost, that had been protecting them from the other ghosts. Somehow he missed this. He is clearly not a very good GhostBuster.

5. Cancer Kid makes a big fire to burn down the house. Then, instead of leaving, he just sits down in the middle of the burning building and waits to die like a retard. Mom rushes in to save him. She finds him, and then, amazingly, she also sits down with him and waits for death. Is everyone in this family terminally stupid? However, a fireman saves both of them, because he is not stupid and understands that a burning building is something one should try to leave. In the end, nobody dies in this movie at all. Not even Creepy Ghost Man, who is more expendable than a red-shirted ensign in Star Trek. Post-script informs us that the ghosts are gone and Cancer Kid does not die of cancer. The End.