Amityville: The Awakening (2017)


Possibly the real Amityville curse is that, after over four decades, no one has figured out how to make a good movie based on the source material.  True or not, one would think that, after years of classic haunted house movies, one of the Amityville films would at least figure out the formula.  The Amityville Horror had its moments, but was largely and overlong tedious slog, while the less said about the remake the better.  Amityville II: The Possession ruined a perfectly good b-grade horror film by tacking on more tedious nonsense, while the Amityville 3-D undercut a decent haunted house story with a silly gimmick. 

That brings us to the early 2010s.  Despite this movie coming out in 2017 it was largely conceived in 2012, which is probably the reason Bella Thorne spends most of it looking like a stoned mime.  The filming was done in 2015, with a ton of reshoots in 2016, but it is obvious that no one thought to check and see if teenagers had changed at all in the intervening years.  The film also carries over a trend from the late 2000s of being "self-aware," as this doesn't take place in any of the other Amityville timelines, but instead in our world where the book and the movies are considered to be fiction.  This self awareness, obviously, never went as far as looking at the script and the whole idea for the movie and just abandoning it. 

Belle (Thorn), her mother Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and younger sister Juliet (Mckenna Grace) move into the home at 112 Ocean Avenue.  Supposedly it is so her brother James (Cameron Monaghan), who is in a coma, can be near to his physician Dr. Milton (Kurtwood Smith).  Joan and her sister Candice (Jennifer Morrison) are fully aware of the house's history, but fail to let Belle or Juliet in on it.  Belle, of course, eventually finds out from students at school.

While the whole legend is thought to be fiction, things do start happening once they are in the house.  Juliet begins speaking with James, who appears to be slowly coming out of his coma.  What concerns Belle is that she is not sure that it is truly her brother and suspects that whatever convinced Ronnie Defeo Jr. to murder his family may be taking over James.

Though top-billed, Jennifer Jason Leigh isn't in this much, and really does nothing more than be a distant parent to Belle.  This is pretty much Bella Thorne's film, which is a pity since she's barely capable of taking on even material this simplistic.  If the movie would have come out when originally scheduled it would have been Mckenna Grace's first film, but she just plays the token little girl and not much else.  In typical Hollywood fashion everyone, including a nerd named Terrence (Thomas Mann) that befriends Belle at her school, looks like models and not normal people at all.  Even Cameron Monaghan, while laying in a coma most of the film, looks like he stepped out of a teen drama. 

As for the movie it tries to be a cross between Patrick and Amityville II, failing heavily and failing even heavier by trying to shoehorn a troubled teen story into it.  Ultimately it became the last Amityville film to get theatrical release, but that was limited, with it going to direct to streaming and DVD almost immediately.  It probably would not make the movie any better but about 15 minutes or so was chopped out of the movie when suddenly Dimension decided they wanted to make it another PG-13 horror film.

Since then the entire idea of Amityville has been dying a death of a thousand papercuts with all the direct-to-video garbage related to it.  Despite that, as a series anyone cared about, about the only good thing Amityville: The Awakening did is convince studios not to waste any further money on it, since the movies that came after might as well have been done by a 16-year-old with an iPhone.

Amityville: The Awakening (2017)
Time: 87 minutes
Starring: Bella Thorne, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Cameron Monaghan, Mckenna Grace
Director: Franck Khalfoun

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more