Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Well, here we are again; another year, another Amityville sequel, the 18th(!!!) in the series. As is often the case, the story behind the film is often more interesting than the film itself and that is certainly the case here, so I'll make the plot description nice and short (I mean, it's a fucking Amityville sequel, who cares, right?). Luckily, there isn't much of a plot to recount!

40 years after the events that forced the Lutz family to flee, an awful single mother and her child --a wannabe-goth older daughter, an annoying younger daughter, and a son who's been in a vegetative state for two years following a convoluted accident-- move in, operating under the impression that the powers enclosed in the house will somehow cure the son's coma....for some reason. Much to the surprise of everyone his condition DOES indeed begin to improve! Has the house grown benevolent in its old age? Or does the house have plans for the infirm lad?

Anyway, now onto the shit I actually want to talk about:

Dimension Films originally signed writer/director Franck (P2, 2012's Maniac remake) Khalfoun to deliver a Rated-R film, and once the film was shot they, as Dimension has a history of doing, essentially locked Khalfoun out of the building and recut it. However, instead of doing what they usually do and secretly hiring a scab director to reshoot half the film so it makes no fucking sense (see Halloween 6: The Curse of Micheal Myers), they, for reasons unknown to anyone, cut Awakening down to a PG-13--removing some gore gags and an entire incest subplot-- as if this thing was ever going to play theaters. They then proceeded to take the newly-neutered film and shelved it, playing chicken with a release date for FIVE WHOLE YEARS before finally dumping it onto DVD. 

So all that's kinda fucked, right? Those edits against the wishes of the major creative force must be why the movies not so great, right? Guys, I'm gonna be perfectly honest here, I don't think any amount of blood splatters or or weird mother/son bone-zoning would've helped the cliched script, the oddly dull camera work, some of the worst acting I've seen in quite some time, or an obnoxiously meta subplot that includes the other Amityville movies existing as movies in this universe --at one point one of the low-rent Siouxsie Sioux ripoff's friends actually holds the fucking Amityville Horror DVD up to the camera, as if reminding us we could've spent this time watching a better film.

I've seen plenty of reviews stating they believe there was a good movie hidden somewhere in The Awakening but it was silenced by producer meddling. I, on the other hand, feel like the only good thing I can say about it was I'm glad to see the family's fridge was stocked with Big Red instead of any of the more well-known soda brands.