Release Date: 3/27/09
Sara and Peter Campbell are having trouble dealing with their son Matt’s health problems. Matt has cancer and gets a special treatment at a hospital in upstate Connecticut which is a good distance away from their home. So Sara decides to find a house to rent near the hospital until the treatment is complete. The only one in their price range is one “with a history”. Turns out the house is a former funeral home complete with a basement room where dead bodies were tended to. Matt starts seeing weird visions of a young boy in the house while being terrorized by other ghost-like beings. It’s based on true events and was originally a documentary on the Discovery Channel. It’s a creepy movie. Definitely a lot of moments that will make you jump. But they were a tad overdone and lacked big time scares.
Virginia Madsen plays Sara, the mother who is having a very hard time dealing with her young son’s health issues. She has a few emotional scenes when Matt starts getting worse and worse but will never admit to how bad things are. Martin Donovan is Peter, the alcoholic father who is having trouble dealing with their money problems while fighting back the urge to get hammered to chase his troubles away. You can tell there is some heat between the two and we find out his drinking problems have caused possible violent issues in the past. They also have two very young kids and a girl (Amanda Crew) that helps out around the house with the youngins. But the main character is Kyle Gallner’s Matt. He is constantly tortured by visions, sometimes even being transported to past events and living them. He looks very sickly and plays the part well. You feel sorry for the kid and the entire family in general. Acting wise, everyone did a good job.
If you like horror movies that are FILLED with moments that make you jump then this one is for you. Sometimes I think that’s a cheap way to scare an audience. In my opinion, its not really a scare when someone surprises you. Although there are SOME genuinely scary moments, there weren’t enough that really freak you out. Basically you’re just sitting there trying to prepare for the next thing to JUMP at the screen. The weird part is why wouldn’t this family leave the house after one night of crazy stuff happening? They stay there for a long time and Matt just keeps sleeping in the basement where dead bodies were kept. Plus, they didn’t have much story going on besides creepy ghost scenes once they moved into the house. They had to rush through the day time scenes so they could get back to night time and the creeps could continue. I felt like every 5 minutes they went back to another scene with Matt asleep in bed. But the movie was definitely creepy, I’m not bashing it. It just had a lot of horror clichés, one of which being the weird guy with insight into ghosts (who was played by Elias Koteas, Casey Jones from TMNT). There’s always THAT GUY who helps out in the end. Its hard to make an original ghost story since so many bad ones have come out over the years. This is based on true events but facts were probably embellished a bit for the big screen. It works well but this was a case of the trailer being better than the movie. That thing really creeped me out.
IMDB – N/A
Rotten Tomatoes – 33%
Movie Wiseguys – 6.5/10