Movie Review: The Amityville Haunting

Synopsis: Actual found footage that documents the horrifying experiences of a family that moved into the infamous haunted house!

Well, not really. They can try as hard as they want but all that "it's real!" nonsense hasn't fooled anyone since The Blair Witch Project. It's still sort of fun though I guess, when executed properly anyway. Which this movie isn't.

If you've seen any of the Paranormal Activity films you know exactly what to expect here. This is EXACTLY like those with the exception of it being in the famous Amityville horror house. Of course, it's just another house except that we're told a few times it's the old Amityville home and there is just a tiny bit mentioned about it. I remember the scariest thing about the original house being those unique and evil eye-looking windows, and they're on the cover of this DVD (see pic to the right). Guess what? They're not in the movie. The house isn't set on a river either, with no boathouse. It's just another suburban house it seems. It never feels like it has anything to do with the original house.

It doesn't help the realism factor that the acting in this is just simply dreadful. The youngest daughter is OK, but everybody else is bad. The main role is the kid doing the narrating and "working the camera" for the whole movie. He seems like he's just reading a part. It just makes it so hard to get emotionally invested when his reactions to situations just seem dull. Best scene though... the dad loses it at one point and begins freaking out. I was literally laughing out loud. There's also a character's death (in bed) that's about high school play level acting.

Even a few times I thought things might pick up it just goes right back to dull. For the 90 minute duration there's about 5 minutes of actual fun. Otherwise they're yelling at the kid to quit filming them or showing shots of the interior of the house from security cams... WITH NOTHING GOING ON. Paranormal Activity does this too, but I was so tense from the suspense those moments were freaking me out. Here, there's never a pay off. They're just boring.

There's a bit of gore, not much really, and only a couple of decent scares and creepy moments to speak of. For some reason I found it interesting enough to sit though but I wouldn't recommend it for a normal human. Fans of the original source material will be offended... as will fans of decent acting. It's like a porn minus the porn.

3/10