THE AMITYVILLE HAUNTING (2011)

Studio:       The Asylum
Director:    Geoff Meed
Writer:       Geoff Meed
Producer:  David Michael Latt
Stars:      Jason Williams, Devin Clark, Amy Van Horne, Gracie Largent, Luke Barnett

Review Score:

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Summary:

Tyler Benson records the mysterious events that plague his family when they move into the infamous Amityville Horror house.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Four teenagers record themselves on a cell phone breaking into the Amityville Horror house. Two of them are killed while having sex in a bathroom. The other couple is attacked by something unseen.

The Benson family consists of father Douglas, mother Virginia, teenage daughter Lori, youngest daughter Melanie, and son Tyler. A budding filmmaker, Tyler constantly records his family. His footage begins with a realtor showing his family the Amityville home. Various shots show the nervous realtor and a buzzing power line outside. The realtor leaves the family to discuss the house amongst themselves. Lori and Virginia are apprehensive, but Douglas claims the house is all they can afford. They decide to buy the house but then find that the realtor has dropped dead from an aneurysm in their driveway.

Day 1 – June 12, 2008: The Bensons move into the home. Out on the front lawn, a teenaged boy named Greg and his friend are walking their dogs and they introduce themselves to Lori. Tyler interviews the three moving men, but they do not know the history of the house. Tyler records some strange noises and images. One of the movers falls down a staircase while carrying a box and dies, although the fall itself is not captured on video. Virginia is distraught after the death and argues with her husband about living in the house. Lori is upset about her brother’s videotaping and tells her mother that she just wants to go home. Melanie starts talking to an imaginary friend. Tyler’s closet door opens and slams shut mysteriously.

Day 2 – June 13, 2008: Douglas is upset about finding the back door open and confronts Lori about sneaking out of the house, which she denies. Melanie pours a bowl of cereal for her imaginary friend. Douglas convinces the girls to go out for the day while he and Tyler install a security camera in the living room. Tyler searches the kitchen for a screwdriver and finds the teenagers’ cell phone from the prologue scene. A toolbox falls off a table while they are setting up the camera. Tyler has his mom watch the video he found on the cell phone but she dismisses it without watching the whole thing. At 3:15am, the back door is seen opening by itself on the security camera.

Day 3 – June 14, 2008: Tyler has his parents watch the cell phone video but it is again dismissed and they stop watching before the deaths occur. Tyler follows his dad while he inspects the house and films a window covered in flies. Douglas finds his youngest daughter talking to her imaginary friend, John Matthew, and questions her about him. The parents later question Lori about how Melanie knows the name John Matthew, because he was a little boy murdered in the house by Ronald DeFeo, Jr. Virginia talks to her son about his constant filming. Douglas starts acting strangely. At night, he catches Lori sneaking in the back door with Greg. He attacks Greg, points a gun at him, and throws him out of the house. Outside, Tyler records Greg being pulled offscreen by something unseen. A police officer searches outside but does not find anything. He tells Douglas that he will come back in the morning.

Day 4 – June 15, 2008: The police officer finds blood outside and talks to the parents. The security camera shows a misty figure opening the back door for Melanie, who says, “thank you, John.” Douglas comes back inside and talks to his daughter about her imaginary friend. A forensic investigator also finds the blood, but has no other information for the Bensons. They discuss the haunting and house history briefly and a ghostly figure appears on the security camera while they are speaking. Tyler tries speaking with his father but Douglas behaves erratically and ignores his son. Douglas makes a phone call. A man appears with a steel briefcase and begins looking at the house. He is a friend of Douglas’, but their relationship and his purpose are unclear. He starts installing new cameras. Tyler records the buzzing power line outside again. The new camera picks up a strange figure that scares the mystery man. While outside, the power line falls and kills the man. The back door also opens and closes by itself again that night. Tyler finds his mother consoling Douglas, who is crumpled on the floor and is crying.

Day 5 – June 16, 2008: Douglas’ strange behavior continues. He interrupts his daughter while she is in the living room playing with John Matthew. He reviews the security camera and seems to see the boy. He tries to fight the invisible boy and then tells Melanie not to speak to John Matthew again. Later, another camera shows an image of a bloody man during a power outage.

Day 6 – June 17, 2008: Virginia plans to leave with the kids. Douglas enters with a bag of crosses and religious paraphernalia. He places the items throughout the house while the rest of the family tries vainly to speak with him. He tells his family that they are not going to leave the house. Tyler has his sister ask John Matthew questions. John Matthew can be seen sitting at the dining room table on the security camera. John supposedly tells Melanie that he wants her to stay forever but he wants the rest of the family to leave. Later, Douglas frightens his family by being in full military mode.

Footage between 3:00-4:00am: Lori is attacked by an unseen force. She contorts and dies violently in her bed. Victoria goes downstairs and is pulled away by something unseen before a bloody man appears on a security camera. Tyler investigates and finds his bloody mother in the kitchen when the ghostly man then appears to him. His camera cuts out. John Matthew appears on the security camera in the master bedroom. Melanie takes the boy’s place and then stabs her father in the chest. John Matthew reappears behind Melanie.

Unknown source: Melanie wishes her family goodbye through audio only. She indicates that she is now with John Matthew.

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Review:

At the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Bob Weinstein announced plans for a “found footage” movie titled “The Amityville Horror: The Lost Tapes.”  Partnering with Miramax and Dimension Films, Jason Blum of “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious” fame was tapped as producer.  I liked the idea of a “found footage” movie based on a well-known property and there was enough associated talent above-the-line to justify my piqued interest.  A few months went by after the announcement and I still had it in the back of my mind as one to watch for, but I had forgotten the title.

That is how The Asylum duped me.  As low-budget film fans are already aware, The Asylum is a production company that has made a dubious name for itself by pinching out “mockbusters,” also known as “granny films.”  This is because their DVDs typically land in the checkout aisle at Rite Aid, where a well-intentioned granny sees “Transmorphers” and confuses it with those robot cars that her grandson likes.  Little Jimmy is either too kind to point out the mistake, or doesn’t feel like wasting breath explaining the difference between the “Transformers” and the “Transmorphers.”  Either way, no one will bother returning the knock-off to Rite Aid.

So it was that I loaded up the “found footage” thriller (“thriller” should probably be in quotation marks, too), “The Amityville Haunting.”  The third title card was the first clue that something was amiss.  It mentions the Lutz family living in the notorious house for two years when the original story was pretty clear about the fact that they were only there for about a month.  Anyone with even a passing interest in The Amityville Horror probably remembers this.  You would think someone making a film based on the story might take two seconds to straighten a fact using Google.

The footage opens with a prologue of four teenagers breaking into the infamous house for a night of amateur ghost hunting.  Within moments, the camera cuts abruptly to two of the teens having sex in a bathroom.  My Spider-Sense was tingling.  Not because there was a teenage sex scene, but because something about the staging and suddenness just did not feel right.  When one teen later exploded, literally, during sex, I knew for certain that something was wrong.  Not that the films they make always turn to gold or anything, but there was no way Bob or Harvey Weinstein would have their names on a film with acting and direction this low grade.  I hit Pause, and then hit the computer.  Then I hit my forehead.  Of course, I was watching The Asylum’s version of Amityville found footage.

With my expectations recalibrated to a significantly lower level, I begrudgingly returned to the movie.  Despite a new awareness of the quality I was likely due, I still met with disappointment.  “The Amityville Haunting” is a premise hoping for a full movie to flesh out its bones by happenstance, without making a conscious effort to turn that goal into reality.

Strangely, the movie does not make the most use out of its connection to The Amityville Horror, aside from a brief shot of an outdoor window covered in flies.  Among other elements, the original story included a pig with glowing red eyes, walls that bled slime, a secret red room in the basement, and demonic faces that appeared in the fireplace.  Plenty of fodder for a haunted house story (as evidenced by the double digit number of films in the Amityville series).  Yet “The Amityville Haunting” sets all that aside and chooses two different ghosts to haunt the new residents.  IMDB lists the adult ghost as Ronald DeFeo, Jr.  I looked around and could find no claim directly from The Asylum that this is who it is supposed to be.  I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt then, and just tag this phantom as some mystery entity.  Since DeFeo is still alive in a New York prison as I write this, it would be somewhat difficult for him to be a ghost.

The other ghost is John Matthew, the nine-year-old boy who was a victim of the real-life DeFeo murders at the house in 1974.  He first appears as an imaginary friend to young Melanie.  Why this innocent child would become a malevolent spirit is anyone’s guess.  And whether or not The Asylum crossed a line by turning a real-life child murder victim into a haunting phantasm for a low-rent horror movie is for someone else to argue.  It would have made more sense for the little girl’s imaginary friend to be Jodie, the same imaginary friend that Missy/Amy had in the original story.  This is just one of the curious choices that haunt the film.

It is certainly no sin to make a “found footage” movie without a complete script.  For dialogue, anyway.  But even Larry David uses an outline for staging scenes on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  There seems to be a lack of specific screen direction in any Amityville Haunting scene that involves something more than just people talking.  When Douglas decides to install a security camera in the living room, he surveys the ceiling for an unusual amount of time before finally settling on the obvious spot for the camera: the corner.  More specifically, the corner facing the door he wants to watch.  Where else would he put it?

Douglas’ friend who installs more cameras later appears similarly confused about how to kill time while delivering lines.  He looks around the camera like he is seeing it for the first time and keeps poking at it long after it is situated.  He fiddles with it so much that it falls when he loosens a hinge.  I would bet money that was an accident, yet they kept that take.

Offering a positive note (since I’m determined to find one), Jason Williams strikes a decent tone of intentionally “aggravating” as the father, Douglas, who wants to pass his military discipline down to his children.  His son Tyler more than once tries to show him and his wife a video of strange deaths found on a cell phone.  Although several people have already died in the short time they have been in the house, the parents still refuse to watch the video in its entirety.  The way they so eagerly dismiss Tyler’s claims in light of what they themselves have witnessed is comical.  But I was still reminded of that frustrated feeling children do have when parents just will not listen.

There is also the way Douglas separately accuses all three children in a row of leaving the back door open and commands “don’t lie to me” during every interrogation.  His parenting prowess, or lack thereof, flavors him as one of those know-it-all fathers who never has time to give his children the benefit of the doubt.  Douglas ends up showing the most personality and becomes the most developed character in the movie.

Oddly enough, he is then completely misused and never becomes as truly menacing as he should be at the climax.  He points a gun at one teenager, turns his eyes into a death stare when talking to his daughter about John Matthew, and starts acting like he is not even aware of his family’s presence while in a manic trance.  It seemed as though the filmmakers wanted to parallel the original storyline by having Douglas go “George Lutz” on his family, but they pull away from that thread just before the last act in favor of focusing on the ghosts.  Douglas has a nervous breakdown, goes into full military mode one more time, and then just ends up another victim.  Again it seemed like the filmmakers moved forward with half of an idea and no clear direction on where to go with it.

Bigger than the fact that very little here actually relates to the Amityville legends (other than John Matthew nonsensically becoming an evil spirit) is the issue that the movie is dull, and not at all scary.  Most instances of paranormal activity are just doors opening or closing on their own.  Nearly all of the deaths occur offscreen.  The two that are in full view use static and corrupted video to mask the carnage (and the sub-par FX).  “The Amityville Haunting” is a by-the-numbers paranormal haunting movie that does not even cover all of the numbers.  From the way that the iconic home exterior is never shown to the under-staged acting and cheap FX, every low-budget string is on full display.  There is no sense of passion evident anywhere.

There is an errant comma in one of the date and time stamps.  “Residence” is misspelled “residents” on the coroner’s reports at the end of the film, along with “extreme” spelled as “extream.”  John Matthew is referred to as “John Matthews” for much of the film until the characters suddenly start saying the name correctly near the end.  After the living room security camera is replaced with one that shoots in color, we still see a shot from that camera in black-and-white.  Sure, these are extremely minor quibbles that most of the audience may never notice.  These easily ignored mistakes do not even affect my already-low-enough review score.  I point them out to highlight just how sloppy the detail is in this film.  It delivers an impression that any effort put forth here was minimal.  And if the filmmakers do not care that much about their movie, then why should I?

Review Score:  10

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