Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

Amityville: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie Review

Wake me up when it's over.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 14, 2017

While the underlying situation is certainly no laughing matter, I couldn’t help but have a kind of raised eyebrow bemusement when I received a delay notice about Amityville: The Awakening's Blu-ray release due to unspecified “issues with The Weinstein Company”. Perhaps like anyone who deigns to move into 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville: The Awakening seemed to have been cursed itself, with numerous delays “haunting” its actual theatrical release schedule. The Weinstein Company’s well publicized travails of late perhaps only add insult to injury, but the fact is Amityville: The Awakening has “issues” of its own which it’s never able to overcome, including a basic conceit that seems at least a little reminiscent of a similar device in the fairly recent Naomi Watts thriller Shut In. The Amityville franchise has frankly never offered paradigms of horror brilliance, but The Amityville Horror, Amityville II: The Possession and Amityville 3-D all played at least tangentially with the underlying true life horror of the murder of the DeFeo family in 1974, if only in explorations as to whether the stories about the focal house being “possessed” were factual or the figments of some enterprising folks’ imaginations. Amityville: The Awakening has arguably the least convincing tether to that underlying “true life” story, and as such it almost seems like an afterthought (or at best, a marketing strategy) to even locate this story in Amityville. But horror perhaps more than many other genres often relies on “known quantities” in terms of franchise titles and the like, and while not really all that salient to the actual story, the Amityville house and its assumed demonic influence on various people is at the core of this particular tale.

Note: While the “basics” of Amityville: The Awakening are pretty predictable, I’m going to discuss one particular plot artifice which might be considered spoiler material by some, and so anyone wanting to experience the film with blinders still on (so to speak) is encouraged to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below.

Joan Walker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has moved her daughters Belle (Bella Thorne) and Juliet (Mckenna Grace) and son James (Cameron Monaghan) into the legendary abode at 112 Ocean Avenue in Long Island’s Amityville community. In the plot point which is somewhat reminiscent of Shut In, Joan is recovering from the death of her husband and an accident which has left James in what amounts to a persistent vegetative state. When Belle suggests that the move has done something to James that has left him perhaps slightly less “vegetative”, the arc of this particular entry in the Amityville franchise is probably clear, at least for those who have become accustomed to the many films involving the focal house’s ability to affect its inhabitants.

Meanwhile, Belle is trying to adjust to her new school life, where kind of weirdly she’s taunted for having moved into the infamous house. That opens up a whole “meta” angle where she, along with some new friends, attempt to watch The Amityville Horror late one evening, only to have things start to go bump. In a simultaneously unfolding subplot, James’ neurologist Dr. Milton (Kurtwood Smith) begins detecting new spikes in James’ brain activity, and sure enough, soon James seems to be recovering to the point that he can communicate with an interface of sorts.

Already the central conceit of this particular Amityville enterprise is glaringly obvious: the house has a history of working its evil will on unsuspecting folks, and James seems to be the latest “victim” of such “behavior”. But here’s where Amityville: The Awakening wants to offer its putative twist, which is in and of itself also pretty glaringly predictable, and which involves Joan’s true motives in moving her family to this reviled location. And it’s also here that Amityville: The Awakening reveals the shallowness of its attempt to cash in on the “Amityville” title. The whole film probably would have been much more effective had it been shorn of this location, since plopping the family down in the “Amityville horror” house comes with its own set of pre-arranged expectations. Had this film taken this general premise and simply set it in some other (unknown) home, there could have been considerably more suspense generated as to what is really going on. This would have ported over to the whole Joan aspect as well, and potentially could have delivered a much more powerful shock at a certain revelatory point, at least if performances could have been modulated appropriately.

All of this said, there are certainly scares in Amityville: The Awakening, though they often tend to be cheap ones. Leigh has always been an interesting actress with tons of subtext informing her performances, but that very aspect tends to give away one of the central "surprises" the film supposedly has in store. However, for all intents and purposes Thorne is the "real" star of this film, and she does a creditable job detailing the trials of Belle as she attempts to deal with a rather massive amount of family dysfunction.

Amityville: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Amityville: The Awakening is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The IMDb lists the Canon 500 as having been utilized, with the results being generally very sharp and well detailed when lighting conditions allow. Unfortunately, large swaths of this film play out in either near darkness or (at times) actual complete darkness, and as such detail levels are fairly variable. Some of the darkest moments have virtually no shadow definition, perhaps by design. The nicely lit and often bright and even summery outdoor material actually pops quite well, with commendable sharpness and precision, and typically very high levels of fine detail. The palette is a little drab looking, especially in some of the interior scenes.

Amityville: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Amityville: The Awakening features a rather robust DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one that combines expected startle effects with more nuanced placement of ambient environmental sounds that offer at times very evocative and creepy recreations of things going bump (and other sounds) in the night. There's some good differentiation in terms of the more cloistered environments inside the house and several outside scenes that are also utilized. Dialogue, score and effects are all rendered cleanly and well prioritized on this problem free track.

Amityville: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Amityville: The Awakening (1080p; 5:09) is a generic EPK with some (spoilerish) scenes from the film and okay interviews.

Amityville: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Okay, these final comments will perhaps tip over into the un-PC, something I unapologetically cop to since I have a pretty outrageous (and tolerant) sense of humor, but in this case the comparison I'll ultimately make is linked to a perhaps un-PC anecdote by none other than Jack Lemmon, so at least I'll be in good company should I be damned. On an old talk show whose specifics I frankly can't recall, Lemmon told what I personally found to be one of the funniest anecdotes ever, about his longtime friend and collaborator Walter Matthau. Evidently Lemmon, his wife, and Matthau and his wife liked to vacation together, except that the Matthaus were often bickering. They were on a train in Europe one day when the Matthaus really got into it, at which point Walter turned to his wife and said, "Now see what you've done? You've ruined my trip to Auschwitz!" That story has cracked me up for years, and in a similarly insouciant fashion one might imagine a worker at the beleaguered Weinstein Company berating a certain executive with a similar, "Now see what you've done? You've delayed Amityville: The Awakening!" Franchise completists or fans of the cast may have more tolerance for the middling effectiveness of this film, and those folks should be generally well pleased with the technical merits of this release.