Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Amityville: The Awakening: Directed by Franck Khalfoun. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bella Thorne, Mckenna Grace, Cameron Monaghan. A desperate single mother moves with her three children into the notorious, supposedly haunted, real-life Amityville house to try and use its dark powers to cure her comatose son. Things go horribly wrong.

“A mother and her two kids move into the Amityville house. Thereu0026#39;s the teen daughter, Belle, the younger daughter Juliet, the dog. The momu0026#39;s got a sister too. No men allowed pretty much. Oh, well, thereu0026#39;s James, but heu0026#39;s in a coma and kept home. Itu0026#39;s Belleu0026#39;s senior year of course and while everyone knows she lives at the Amityville house, she doesnu0026#39;t now anything about it. Until a classmate tries to befriend her and tells her all about the place but because heu0026#39;s male heu0026#39;s the butt of jokes and treated like crap by Belle and some other girl he introduces her to.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBack at the house, the dog barks at stuff, there are shadows, there are pesky flies and Belle starts having vivid nightmares about James. We learn that James is in a coma because of a fight he got into defending Belle, so she is bizarrely held responsible by the mother. Thereu0026#39;s some type of magic circle still around some area of the front lawn somehow.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eEven though the doctor and most of the family think that James is in a coma for good, the mom, who gave up religion because of this situation, is convinced James will recover. And sure enough he does, at a rather amazing pace. The kids suspect James might be possessed and they are right. So somehow Belle will have to save the family before as the fully recovered James goes homicidal.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eEven for a PG-13 horror movie, Amityville: The Awakening, is remarkably dull, lame, uninteresting. Itu0026#39;s hard to connect with the arrogant Belle. Much of the charactersu0026#39; behavior is nonsensical. Worst of all, there is zero sense of dread, nothing is really at stake here. Itu0026#39;s 10 minutes before the movie ends that finally things become deadly. By then of course itu0026#39;s way too late to get some excitement going. Not to mention that this movie doesnu0026#39;t even look good. Itu0026#39;s the kind of movie where itu0026#39;s pitch black most of the time and none of the characters think about turning a frigginu0026#39; light on. Darkness alone doesnu0026#39;t make a horror movie, let alone a good one. The only frightening thing about this movie is how bad it is.”