Filmic Friday 19: Amityville The Awakening

Movie: Amityville the Awakening
Format: Digital? (idk)

This movie came out on the right date.
It was a joke.

I've seen the original Amityville Horror - it's not as scary as most people warned me it was, but it let me understand some more of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror stuff I'd seen as a kid...

This movie makes the original seem like Suspiria by comparison.

Now, I'm a major spleen. I cannot at all stand horror movies. I was scared of Imhotep's slimy corpse in the 90s Mummy movie for years, the BBC horror piece Ghostwatch traumatized me like any 8-year-old when it aired (I saw it decades later as a 20-something), and I honestly can't watch Shaun of the Dead because of that scene where the guy gets pulled apart.

I actively laughed my way through this movie.

There will be spoilers in this blog, so if you want to be fresh with this thing, go right ahead and watch it before coming back.

Word of warning - there's a dog in this movie, and it dies. It's offscreen, but we see its corpse at one point. I guess.



THE PLOT

It's an Amityville movie. It's always the same plot: new family moves into the Amityville Horror House and bad crap happens. Also, there are flies.

In all seriousness, though, this plot is stupid.

A family moves into the House. A single mom, a teenage daughter, a little girl, a dog, and the teenage daughter's twin brother, who's on life support.

Guess which one the flies possess?

Yeah, it's the comatose brother.

Who is emaciated and twisted and cannot move or breathe on his own.

Basically, teenage girl sent nudes to a guy years ago, and he ruined her life with them. Her brother got mad and tried to wreck the creep but ended up paralyzed. Everyone blames the teenage girl. The one who was publicly humiliated because she was already starved for attention and wanted someone to like her.

Mom is a horrible control freak who, rather than let her son be in a hospital where he can be cared for 24/7 by people who actually know what they're doing and have ways to be legally punished if they botch his care, has demanded he be treated in-home at great cost, so now they can only afford to live in a crappy murder house.

I have so many issues with this.

1. Coma boy should absolutely be in a Long-Term Care facility or some other medical facility because they never show him being moved around to prevent bedsores and no one in the house is strong enough to move him on their own.
2. A house that has had murders as messy as the DeFoe murders will almost always be professionally cleaned, which they later make sure to show never happened, which means that house is probably infiltrated with black mold and other airborne pathogens which are 100% fatal to people on ventilators.
3. While the house is only 1.5 miles away from the nearest hospital, and also close to a lot of other stuff, they depict 112 Ocean Ave (changed to or from 108, if I remember correctly) as being secluded. They always make it seem like this place is secluded. It's not. The neighbors on either side are pretty darn close. The yard is positively microscopic.
4. NO ONE EVER TURNS ON ANY LIGHTS IN THIS MOVIE!

The little sister is maybe psychic, maybe being coached by her mom to say all kinds of weird stuff about the brother to her older sister, like that he's happier in the murder house or that he misses his twin. I'm going with "coached by mom", which is much more interesting, because it fits with what likely happened with the Lutz family after they stayed their 28 days in the DeFeo house.

Anyway, things start getting weird when the sister starts having dreams about her brother waking up and being ok and then being very not ok. Because of course. And then they introduce (and disappear) a doctor character. He checks everything over, but when the family leaves the room, he notices some bed sores on the brother and goes to take a look. Bad CG flies explode from the boy's seeping back-wound (which vanishes in the next shot).

Because flies! That's an Amityville thing! Sppoooooookkkkyyyyyy!

How do you think this doctor reacts to having a plague of flies jam themselves down his throat?

Is he horrified and screaming? Does he immediately force himself to vomit? Does he freak out and order the family to leave?

Nope. He's just surprised and mildly perturbed and leaves.

The doctor does not return.

The dog freaks out every time it's in the room with coma-boy, the little sister gets dumber and creepier, and the mom gets more and more obsessed and at one point there's a weird maybe-incest moment that turns out to be a really messed up dream sequence on the twin's part. To be fair, if my mom was as obsessed with my comatose twin as this woman is with her son, I'd probably have some confusing and messed up dreams, too, especially if you consider the psychological trauma this teenager has gone through.

And yes, she looks this empty-headed and confused the entire movie.

Now, I should mention at this point that this movie was made way back in 2013 and only released in 2017. You can tell. The CG is only 2013-mediocre, the slut-shaming is very 2013, and the half-assed goth/punk looks on the teenagers is what a 50-year-old in 2013 would think teenagers wore. Now that you know this, it should help to explain the visual palette of this flick.

Teenage daughter goes to school, where her new friends are apparently obsessed with The Amityville Horror, which...

Yeah. Don't put the Amityville movies in your Amityville movie. That's dumb.

Also, Not!Ron Weasley here is part of teenage daughter's friend group. They are the ones who decide that her brother suddenly and miraculously improving is probably a sign that everything's going to hell.

Guys, stop making me think of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer at a time like this...

They wind up in the basement of the house after their viewing of all the Amityville movies in the Amityville house gets interrupted by a power outage. They're not hiding where they are or what they're doing - the TV's volume is not soft, and it's pretty obvious when people are watching stuff in an old house (I speak from experience, many of my friends and family members have had old houses, and you absolutely cannot hide what you're watching from anyone) - so when the mom suddenly appears in the basement with a freaking gun and screams them out, it's incredibly stupid.

It's probably supposed to fake us out that she's the one getting possessed and not comabro.

Eventually, the movie gets bored of half-assing its tension and goes for the kills (but not after a stupid dream sequence where everything's fine and the brother is 100% well again). The mom is the first to die, after trying to exorcise the demon-thing with a dollar store crucifix. He kills her, then he stalks the girls.

And it's not a great sequence.

But wait! Comaboy is emaciated and wouldn't be able to walk!

Somehow the demon takes him into the cellar, where his twin has exposed the Red Room from the first movie, and he goes in and hugs the wall for a while. Then he's miraculously healthy enough to go around looking like a Stephanie Myers-style vampire with a shotgun.

Seriously. It's this dumb.

It's better than when the demon manifests itself in him. Remember how in the book it's supposed to be a red-eyed pig demon? Nah.

We're going full reptilian.

None of this works.

Not one part of this movie works.

Except for the scene where Comabro makes the little sister go back to bed before he tries to shoot her.

That's when Twin Sister launches herself at him and they both go through the window, landing on the lawn.

I'll hand it to the guy playing the brother, when it comes time for him to basically beg for his life, he's the only convincing part of the scene. If I've been thrown through a window and am cold and naked and terrified, I'm going to be basically swallowing my words while I choke them out. Also, she has to drag him across some stupid circle that's been supposedly permanently drawn around the property. Which, as I've mentioned, is not big enough for this to be a thing.

Long story short, she hauls him across the line and the demon departs, leaving him to deflate and curl up and die.

The movie closes like it opened - with an old-timey sounding newsreel about the new murder(s) and speculating on how Comabro's fingerprints made it onto the gun if the suddenly reappeared doctor says he was unable to walk. There's no news channel on earth, even in 2013, which would allow a segment with audio that bad to go forward, but they had to blend it with the news footage of the DeFeo case, so...

Ugh.

This movie blows.

You should absolutely watch it with friends, and if you can find a riff to go along with it (there are oodles of competent riffers out there - a response to the dry spell we had between the last of the old MST3Ks and the birth of both RiffTrax & Cinematic Titanic and between the fading of CT and the birth of the new seasons of MST3K: The Revival) go for it!

I think that's all for me :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC