Maybe it’s a “me thing,” but if I had a comatose child whose life were dependent on electrical machines and other things to work without a hitch, I wouldn’t knowingly move my loved ones into a legendarily haunted house, no matter how many points the realtor sacrificed to lower the principal.
Yet Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character does just that in Amityville: The Awakening. The 10th official entry in the storied (get it?) Amityville Horror franchise, the Franck Khalfoun film cannily exists in the real world. Its characters discuss not only Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s family slaughter of 1974, but George and Kathy Lutz’s (fabricated?) experiences that informed Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller, which a student recommends, and 1979’s blockbuster movie, which they watch — after briefly considering Amityville II: The Possession and outright deriding the Ryan Reynolds remake, as one should.
That’s a fun conceit in what is a resoundingly dull picture — something to be expected when your lead is the vapid Bella Thorne (Boo! A Madea Halloween), more tabloid personality than actress, as attested by a résumé that extends from the Disney Channel to hardcore pornography. Thorne plays Belle, a single vowel away from her own first name, underlining the low-stretch demands of her role as twin sister to James (Cameron Monaghan, Tron: Ares), the aforementioned vegetative boy who can’t move anything but, we presume, his bowels.
Once 112 Ocean Avenue trots out its usual unlisted amenities — voices from beyond, swarms of CGI flies, dogs driven bonkers, et al. — James’ condition ironically shows signs of inexplicable improvement. Why, it’s almost as if he’s possessed by those vague demonic forces in the cellar’s bricked-up passage to hell.
Amityville: The Awakening is one odd duck feathered with questionable creative choices that suggest a problem-plagued production — not from any Satan basements, but worse: Dimension Pictures’ meddling head honchos Bob and Harvey Weinstein. They copresent with Blumhouse, which aligns with this viewer’s feeling of Awakening having one foot stuck in the teen-horror past as the other struggles to reach as far forward as possible. We know Khalfoun is more than capable of crafting suspense, as his P2 debut and Maniac remake prove, but this tired exercise is merely a jump-scare-a-palooza free of imagination and the ill at ease.
Although toilet goo appears to be absent this go-round, it’s not; the movie itself is a bowl of that. —Rod Lott