This fact-based fright flick starring Virginia Madsen is the second effort in as many weeks to deal in some way with possession and is a mostly mediocre mishmash of better horror films that contains some genuine jolts but nothing to make it truly terrifying.

It’s essentially The Amityville Horror set in the title state sometime in 1987 that sees a cash-strapped family relocating to a new house to better accommodate their teen son’s cancer treatments and subsequently enduring supernatural activity. They soon discover the home used to be a mortuary.

But wait, Sixth Sense fans, there’s more. The teen (Kyle Gallner) is apparently so close to death that he can see dead people walking around the place. Or so he’s told by a cancer-stricken priest (Elias Koteas) who gives the pale kid the supernatural lowdown and offers a friendly ear.

Every now and then I experienced some actual dread and even yelped a time or two, like when one of the teen’s cousin’s hides in a dumbwaiter and you realize something’s in there with him, or when one of the numerous ghosts with writing all over them suddenly pops up in front of Madsen. And the fiery finale features a fun yet grisly revelation that I honestly never saw coming.

But too much of the time director Peter Cornwell employs annoying there’s-a-dead-person-in-the-mirror shots and never manages to make clear enough the connection between piles of displaced corpses, boxes of clipped eyelids, séances, and the hilarious sight of ectoplasm streaming out people’s mouths. He and the script also fail to flesh out an intriguing dad-is-a-recovering-alcoholic angle.

As the mother, the beautiful Madsen (Sideways) mainly looks worried a lot and cries on cue. Koteas is more interesting in what amounts to the Zelda Rubenstein part in Poltergeist, but then he gets to utter lines like, “There’s something evil in this house and it wants your son.” And just like Rubenstein did in that 1982 classic, he pronounces the house to be clean of said evil when for sure it ain’t.

The thing that bugged me most about the film, though, is the annoying Hollywood practice of having healthy people ask people who are clearly suffering if they’re all right. Here everyone keeps posing the question to a teenager…who has cancer. – [DVD]

Horror/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 7/14/09

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