This is not the first time the Wyrick story has been brought to mass audiences. The ghost story shared a three-part episode of Unsolved Mysteries in February 1989 and Virginia-based New Dominion Pictures added its 94-minute IMDb viewer-rated 6.4 version in 2002. Both accounts made an effort to respect the source material in delivering an atmospheric ghost story with an overtone of the grave. So with that in mind, my question for the Wyrick family is as follows ...
Why have you not denounced this Hollywood boondoggle as a farce? How can you let Lionsgate / Gold Circle and its goofy screenwriter David Coggeshall claim that the film is "based on a true story?" How can you let them display photos of your family at the conclusion of the "film"? I would identify all the ways the film deviated from the real story, but it seems absurd to mention Lisa Wyrick's ability to see dead people (she has none) in the same paragraph as a resurrected taxidermist who lured runaway slaves into his dungeon masquerading as a station point for the Underground Railroad. The real Wyrick story is in no way rumored to be connected to the Underground Railroad. But hey, the crawl spaces in the Snedecker home (A Haunting in Connecticut) were not stuffed to the gills with corpses either.
How can anyone claim to like this albatross? Seriously. A corpse (or ghost of a corpse) abducting and assaulting the living? This is no longer the Wyrick story. This is no longer a GHOST story. This is now Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I would have laughed at all the liberties taken with this story if something vital wasn't truly lost to these disrespectful clowns at Lionsgate / Gold Circle. There is evil about this Lionsgate story, but its the ticketmaster and not some fabricated station master at the root of it. Evidence of ghosts is hard enough to come by that when we do encounter compelling stories with certain kinds of validity, we need to preserve their integrity -- not use them as the jumping off point for some wildly fantastical nonsense designed to heat some pools in Tinseltown. Make no mistake -- hack horror writer David Coggeshall took a ghost story that received significant attention from world renown scientific investigators and turned it into The Evil Dead. There's a special place in hell for people like him (probably the same level where Woody Allen put the inventor of aluminum siding in Deconstructing Harry).
And if the hack job wasn't enough, the film did not even deliver scares. How much elegance -- how much high art -- can we expect from a film given the most clumsy title in Hollywood history? Usually when you decide to contort yourself in whatever way is necessary to piggyback off another film, it's usually a critically acclaimed or commercially successful film. A Haunting in Connecticut was neither. In fact, a documentary film company from Suffolk, Virginia is more celebrated for its version of the Connecticut ghost story than the Lionsgate Hollywood studio. Ghosts of Georgia is as connected to A Haunting in Connecticut as the 2002 academy award-winning Chicago was to Woody Allen's Manhattan.
And this was no joy to watch. It was made tedious by the constant labored efforts to tickle our startle reflex -- efforts that are purely mechanical in nature (the images themselves were not interesting or scary). We're treated to our first CGI-generated apparition just 10 seconds into the film and from there it's non-stop ghosts. How a film manages to turn a phenomenon as exotic and controversial as ghosts into common termites is beyond me.
Anyway congratulations on the paycheck. Horror films like this are relatively inexpensive to make nowadays and the profit margin must have good even after coaxing just a few million at the low end of the IQ scale into the theaters. And from what I understand, Gold Circle is set to destroy yet another New Dominion psychodrama titled "The Diabolical," which will be renamed A Haunting in New York.
Why have you not denounced this Hollywood boondoggle as a farce? How can you let Lionsgate / Gold Circle and its goofy screenwriter David Coggeshall claim that the film is "based on a true story?" How can you let them display photos of your family at the conclusion of the "film"? I would identify all the ways the film deviated from the real story, but it seems absurd to mention Lisa Wyrick's ability to see dead people (she has none) in the same paragraph as a resurrected taxidermist who lured runaway slaves into his dungeon masquerading as a station point for the Underground Railroad. The real Wyrick story is in no way rumored to be connected to the Underground Railroad. But hey, the crawl spaces in the Snedecker home (A Haunting in Connecticut) were not stuffed to the gills with corpses either.
How can anyone claim to like this albatross? Seriously. A corpse (or ghost of a corpse) abducting and assaulting the living? This is no longer the Wyrick story. This is no longer a GHOST story. This is now Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I would have laughed at all the liberties taken with this story if something vital wasn't truly lost to these disrespectful clowns at Lionsgate / Gold Circle. There is evil about this Lionsgate story, but its the ticketmaster and not some fabricated station master at the root of it. Evidence of ghosts is hard enough to come by that when we do encounter compelling stories with certain kinds of validity, we need to preserve their integrity -- not use them as the jumping off point for some wildly fantastical nonsense designed to heat some pools in Tinseltown. Make no mistake -- hack horror writer David Coggeshall took a ghost story that received significant attention from world renown scientific investigators and turned it into The Evil Dead. There's a special place in hell for people like him (probably the same level where Woody Allen put the inventor of aluminum siding in Deconstructing Harry).
And if the hack job wasn't enough, the film did not even deliver scares. How much elegance -- how much high art -- can we expect from a film given the most clumsy title in Hollywood history? Usually when you decide to contort yourself in whatever way is necessary to piggyback off another film, it's usually a critically acclaimed or commercially successful film. A Haunting in Connecticut was neither. In fact, a documentary film company from Suffolk, Virginia is more celebrated for its version of the Connecticut ghost story than the Lionsgate Hollywood studio. Ghosts of Georgia is as connected to A Haunting in Connecticut as the 2002 academy award-winning Chicago was to Woody Allen's Manhattan.
And this was no joy to watch. It was made tedious by the constant labored efforts to tickle our startle reflex -- efforts that are purely mechanical in nature (the images themselves were not interesting or scary). We're treated to our first CGI-generated apparition just 10 seconds into the film and from there it's non-stop ghosts. How a film manages to turn a phenomenon as exotic and controversial as ghosts into common termites is beyond me.
Anyway congratulations on the paycheck. Horror films like this are relatively inexpensive to make nowadays and the profit margin must have good even after coaxing just a few million at the low end of the IQ scale into the theaters. And from what I understand, Gold Circle is set to destroy yet another New Dominion psychodrama titled "The Diabolical," which will be renamed A Haunting in New York.