Virginia Madsen rents an old house near the clinic where her son (Kyle Gallner) is getting cancer treatment, though she’s warned the place has “a bit of a history”. Based on a true story (yawn!), this Amityville-alike boasts flashbacks that combine torture porn with spiritualism.
There’s a germ of an idea in the terminally ill teen attuned to seeing ghosts because he’s almost one himself, but Gallner’s smothered by Madsen’s hand-wringing mom, Martin Donovan’s dad and smarmy Elias Koteas in an Exorcist hat. It has gruesome touches (a box of snipped-off eyelids), but the sudden-grab scares soon get pretty tiresome.
