Amityville: The Awakening is a Strange Beast
There’s a lot that can be said about the metafilm Amityville: The Awakening. For starters, it’s a clichéd and boring film telling the story of Belle Walker (Bella Thorne) who moves into 112 Ocean Avenue with her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh), sister (Mckenna Grace) and comatosed brother (Cameron Monaghan) in hopes that he will get better. He miraculously does. However, a demonic presence is lashing itself in James (Monaghan)’s body and voices tell him to kill his family, the same voices that told Ronald DeFeo to kill his family.
This is the kind of movie that ham-fists its audience that “It’s all happening in real life! It’s not a movie! It can happen to you!” even though all of that is total horsecrap. References to The Amityville Horror movies are made and regarded as total fiction. There’s a nice jab to remakes as to how they are inferior to their original counterparts, and that’s probably the only good moment of the movie or the surprising, albeit confusing, moment where Jennifer Jason Leigh smacks Thorne with a gun. See, I don’t even know if it was Jennifer Jason Leigh, because the scenes in the dark are so poorly lit [and shot] that you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on — but fail miserably.
It’s a very clichéd “rinse and repeat” film, in which the same situations happen over and over and over again until the demonic presence takes a hold of James’ body, but it takes 70 minutes (out of 85) before that happens. Instead, you’re stuck with [very cheap and not properly built up] unscary jumpscares, thunder, lightning, visions, hallucinations, nightmares and the jist of a very clichéd and uninspired horror movie, in the vein of D.J. Caruso’s The Disappointments Room. It’s a movie that takes classic [or predictable] horror movie tropes and does nothing with it. There are many long and terribly expository dialogue that comes within the form of Kurtwood Smith. The aformentioned is one of my favorite actors of all-time and it’s a joy seeing him on screen in every single movie he’s in, however, he can’t make the material he’s given any good, the same with Jennifer Jason Leigh who makes a fool of herself, coupled with the horrible “Music by Rob”, it makes for great unintentional comedy. The only performance that’s worthwile is little Mckenna Grace (the movie was supposed to come out in 2015 but was on the shelf for TWO YEARS!) who gives a sweet performance as a child communicating with the demonic presence, à la Alex Vincent in Child’s Play.
But it isn’t enough. The movie is painfully boring, and that’s the biggest sin of them all. There’s nothing scary about it, nothing thrilling, exciting, suspenseful, entertaining or enthralling. It’s a boring, horribly acted, clichéd horror movie that does nothing new to the [overlong] Amityville franchise. Ignoring all of the other movies and regarding them as fiction is good, because the viewers don’t need to subject themselves to 9 other movies, but it doesn’t matter.
Don’t even see it out of pure curiosity, you’ll be wasting precious time of your precious life.
