While it’s watchable, AMITYVILLE: THE AWAKENING (2017) is an uninspired film that wastes what little it does right
#31DaysOfHorror: October 13
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
The Plot
Late one night in 1974, in Amityville, Long Island, Ronald DeFeo, Jr. killed his entire family with a shotgun. He blamed “the voices.”
A year later, a new family moved in, only to flee weeks later upon becoming convinced that the house was haunted.
This quickly passed into the stuff of legend, inspiring a long-running film franchise.
In 2014, in moved the Walkers, unaware of the house’s history. That is, until someone told them, and they realized, oh, yeah, this place is haunted.
My Review
October 2017 seems to be the month for dormant horror franchises coming back to life. After four years, Cult of Chucky is already out, and it’s very good. Later this month will see a wide(r) release of Leatherface, a prequel to the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre that’s getting decent reviews despite having been initially released as a DirecTV exclusive. It’s the first TCM film in four years. We’ll also get Jigsaw, a follow-up to Saw, which hasn’t had a new movie since 2010, and the SyFy channel will air Jeepers Creepers 3, which is the conclusion to a trilogy that last released a movie in 2003. And on October 12th, for free, Google Play released Amityville: The Awakening, the first official movie about the Amityville horrors since 2005’s remake of the original film.
The only one of these films to hit actual theaters is Jigsaw; the rest are going straight to home video, in one form or another. However, this isn’t the mark of a lack of quality that it once was, indicating a failing franchise. Sometimes it’s simply a recognition that horror fans consume horror movies in a number of ways in the streaming age, and that it might make more sense to let a movie find its audience over time online rather than risk having the movie be labeled a failure at the crowded box office. So, while it might be tempting to make fun of the long-delayed Amityville: The Awakening being dumped on GooglePlay for free, that shouldn’t necessarily tell you anything about its quality.
Unfortunately, though: it’s not very good.
But, it is very watchable! The central family in the story is one raised by a single mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who move into the Amityville house because it’s cheap. They need to redirect their money into caring for the son, James (a very good Cameron Monaghan), who has been in a coma for two years. The older daughter Belle (Bella Thorne, trying her best) thinks the family should pull the plug, but when James immediately starts to improve upon moving in, Belle starts to suspect that he’s been possessed by the ghost of Ronnie DeFeo, Jr. (Who, mind you, is still alive, but we won’t get into that).
In an interesting move, the original Amityville Horror films exist in this movie as movies. Belle makes a friend at her new high school (the woefully-underused Thomas Mann), who is excited to meet the girl who lives in the house from the movies. He brings over a handful of DVDs late one night, so they can watch the films at 3:15AM — the same time that the father in the original films wakes up regularly to experience the maybe-paranormal goings-on — and he offers them the original Amityville Horror, Amityville II: The Possession, and the 2005 remake. So, while Amityville: The Awakening was initially promoted as a direct sequel to the original film that ignores the rest of the continuity, in actuality this movie exists outside the franchise continuity and, presumably, in our own world.
I’ve written about horror’s function as urban legend and folklore a few times this month already, most notably when I went through the Urban Legends franchise. Amityville: The Awakening includes a few references to this concept, including the above acknowledgement of its own franchse and a scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh admonishes her daughter for talking about the history of the house, which she explicitly calls an “urban legend.” However, the film doesn’t really do anything with the concept besides nod to it, and it’s disappointing that this theme isn’t explored further.
For the most part, the movie relies on jump scares and uninspired creepy-creature effects that do the actors a disservice. Monaghan’s performance as a coma patient is excellent; his body is contorted and distended, and he spends most of the movie bound to his bed, acting only through his eyes, which are wide with fear and pain. When he does get up and move around, he does a lot of great physical work to make you believe that he’s a husk of a person possessed by an evil force, from the way he walks, to the way his gnarled hands grasp at the air, to the way he can’t quite seem to get his foot to turn straight. The dodgy CGI work to make him a sharp-toothed demon isn’t necessary.
This speaks to the biggest problem I had with Amityville: The Awakening. I like the first film and even its remake quite a bit; what makes them more than your standard haunted-house fare is the ambiguity in the story, where you’re never quite sure if there really is something happening, or if, as Anton Bitel writes, “ we are watching a man being torn apart by financial difficulties, impotence and the emasculating pressures of having to living with three children who are not his own.” The original stories are very much about the societal pressures put on men to support their families as they are about anything paranormal, and the real horror comes from how men who can’t handle the pressure can erupt into violence and hurt the people around them… which is a frightening, all-too-real thing that really does happen, self-inverting crosses and disembodied voices aside. Masculinity itself is to blame for what happens.
Amityville: The Awakening contains no such ambiguity. I was intrigued at first to see that the main characters in the film were a single mother, her sister, a teenage girl, a young girl, and their aunt. There is definitely thematic material to be mined here that reflects the psycho-social concerns of the original films; single mothers face societal pressure as well, as do families with disabled children, so I was interested to see if the film was going to contain similar themes of nuclear families coming apart at the seams… except, focused on the feminine rather than the masculine.
But… nope. In this film, this is an evil house, and there is an evil spirit possessing Belle’s brother, and that’s that. Amityville: The Awakening contains no ambitions whatsoever aside from delivering a few shocks and thrills.
Which… is fine. It does that. It’s never boring, and the good aspects (Monaghan’s performance and a few genuinely-creepy moments that don’t rely on jump scares) definitely make it watchable. I’ve seen far worse horror movies in theaters this year, like Wish Upon and Friend Request.
And hey, after all… it’s free. Not even just to stream temporarily; if you visit Google Play, you can add it to your Library now, to watch someday at 2AM when nothing on Netflix catches your eye.
