Amityville: The Awakening 2017

I checked this out because I was raised on low budget horror films. Amityville: The Awakening is like a culmination of where the genre is for better and worse. The film was shot in 2014, faced 2016 reshoots because of "negative" test screenings and was a sizable success in foreign theaters. In America it was just dumped out on streaming with no fanfare. Its a shame because this film is a great example of low budget TECHNOLOGY today. I'm talking practical gear like the excellent camera, lighting and editing we now have.

But its also so streamlined that basically every film produced on this economic level is the very same in aesthetics. Worse the budget & technical aspects determine the creative. This film is automatically stunted by the minimal script, shooting days, casting, FX, etc. And this is bare bones. The film is a Frankenstein of stale cliches dressed up in some modestly modern direction. The score is dead, the pace is too tranquil for a horror film and its an identical experience of the big budget exploitation that inspires it. Awakening has no respect for its shared history with the rest of cinema. Its a cold commercial enterprise with no morals or values to share. It sets up a lot of gritty, dark, nihilist tropes and then feeds you kind of warmed over, totally utilitarian philosophy about nothing. Its a great showing of materialism, escapism and maybe its a bit more progressive than horror films from 40 years ago look today, but its not as experimental or energized or focused on entertaining or engaging you in some beauty of its art.

Despite all of that I think Bella Thorne & Jennifer Jason Leigh do a lot to inject some life and honor in this bad movie. Its a waste of Thorne to be honest because she has too much range for such bad scripts but she makes it an opportunity to show her acting chops, which are still green but. being a child actor, she's definitely learned a lot from other actors. She gets a lot to sponge from Leigh who has always been a tragically powerful and very capable B-movie actress. I think Leigh is stronger than this film which hurts her performance a bit. There's no range to the character so her forceful acting seems campy & hammy, which she's done well avoiding in her career.

Do we blame the producer & director or the production company? I think we blame the banks that invest in these films. They demand films fit something old & popular over potentially being important & entertaining. "Awakening" is so beholden to the past and playing safe, just making a cheap buck and exploiting its workers. Also the film has a disgusting number of gratuitously sexual shots of an underage lead actress. No surprise that this has ties to the Weinsteins. And again its the same dreck they've put out for 20 years. So maybe the fault lies with the current studio heads running the film business into the ground.