The Amityville Haunting [Blu-ray]

The husband is a gunnery sergeant that never figured out that there is a difference between home life and army life. The wife is written as a useless, emotionally battered housewife. The daughter is your stereotypically rebellious teenager. The middle kid is so annoying it hurts with his "Spielberg" nonsense, and the youngest is passable because she just has to be "cute 4-year old #201232." And the writers want us to feel bad for them. They want us to hope they live. The stupid "color by numbers" characters would be fine if they could act, but holy crap. It's all just bad.The writing is next level awful, which makes me think that these actors aren't quite to blame. The kid has video proof of ghosts, and somehow finds an iPod (teenagers still use iPods? Those are still being made?) with a recording of the opening scene in which four sexually adventurous teenagers get killed, but the adults won't watch it because boobs. Or, as we smart viewers know, because the script can't let them watch or else they'll just leave. The family has to wait to leave until their aunt comes back from vacation? Like, why not just leave now? Go stay in a hotel or sleep in your car or slum it. Why stick around? And the daughter is so batcrap crazy that when an obvious ghost tells her he wants her to stay forever and her family to leave, she's just like "Yep. That's what he said!"And what does this dad do for a living? This mom? Anyone? They've moved 5 times in the past 13 months or whatever, why? That's not the army, because he'd be able to live on base or afford something better. They explicitly state that this house is all they can afford, but why? Because the father and mother won't get jobs? Don't just throw out the money excuse if you're not going to explain *why* money is an excuse.Everything here is bad. It's awful. Nothing is scary. Even in much cheaper knockoffs, like "Bad Ben," the camera work is better. But that kid controlling everything has to mean that everything shakes and he never checks his footage so it's not even useful. It takes an hour for more than a door opening to happen, and the kid videotapes it, but no one watches it to find out that the teenager was yanked away by a demon ghost thing. He literally has it on film, but no one even thinks to watch it.Avoid. Avoooooid. Stay the hell away from this one. It's so, so bad. This film doesn't need to be seen by anyone.

THE AMITYVILLE HAUNTING (2011) is a "found footage" film purportedly showing us footage that the police discovered from phones they found in the house, but since it is from The Asylum, I guess you know what that means. That's right, it's awful. For one thing, the house this film was "shot" in (and I use that term sparingly) looks nothing like the Amityville house and the characters are so annoying, you'll want the demons of the house to kill them immediately. This is the type of film that when anything interesting is about to happen, the video on the phone glitches out and we return to the footage after the bad stuff happens. It's cheap, boring and crappy (in that order). I has a better time counting the kernels of corn in my stool.

I picked this to watch because I was truly a fan of the original Amityville Horror. The fact that the producers of this film tried to ride the coattails of that movie is an appalling affront to the original story. First off, it's a "found footage" sort of film where one character spends the whole time filming the entire thing (ostensibly as an up and coming filmmaker or a documentary writer). In my entire 54 years on this Earth, I've never met anyone even remotely like this, but apparently they're all over the place, dropping like flies, and having random strangers finding their "lost footage". So anyway, that's the whole premise of this snoozapalooza. The kid is annoying AF bothering everyone the whole time with his video camera. The father is probably suffering from PTSD from his tour in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever, the mother is the most believable character (if this film has such a beast), and the daughter characters seem to be emulating their counterparts from Poltergeist. I never developed any emotional attachments to any of the family members, so they became impossible to cheer for. As another reviewer puts it, you're rooting for the family to be ripped apart by the demons of the house. Because that, at least, will mercifully bring an end to this excruciatingly painful and needless rehash of the Amityville story. Here are my main issues with this film:1. The plot in this film does literally nothing to enhance the original story. A four year old would write a better story than this. This is literally the bare-bones formula of a haunted house story with zero embellishment. It could literally be expressed mathematically, such as; a = family moves in to cheap house + b = cheap house is haunted + c = family soon regrets their decision.2. The acting is fourth rate, like that box you mail to India and you don't care if it ever gets there. Children are better actors when they play "House" or "Doctor". There is little to interest the audience in anything they say or do, and in fact, they are at times idiots, and jerks. There is nothing that happens in this film that endears any of the characters to the audience.3. There is no feature that ties this house to the look of the house of the original Amityville house at all. It doesn't even have the iconic windows or the boathouse. There aren't even any scenes in the basement.4. There are none of the classic haunting scenes in this movie; no bleeding walls, no storm struck windows, nothing. Occasionally, we get to see some very crappy effects of apparitions caught on video. The child ghost isn't scary at all except for the fact that he does appear a bit anachronistic (the original supposedly took place in 1974).5. There is no mystery to this story. None of it is psychological at all, which is what made the original story such a great classic horror movie. The original family is allowed to live, but you know they're traumatized for the rest of their lives. In this film, the demon or ghost simply kills everyone, for not really any known reason, other than perhaps because they've trespassed. I am left thinking, if that is the sole reason for killing the family, then the ghost or demon would've easily just done so on the first day they arrived.6. The scene with the teenagers in the beginning could have totally been left on the cutting room floor. It was extraneous, unnecessary to the plot, and was simply gratuitous. But they had to leave behind an old iPod or cell phone for the young son to discover, for proof the house was haunted. Even though he was already onto that. And it didn't even convince his parents when he was finally able to show it to them, because who believes anything their own son would say anyway?Yeah maybe we are all shut in right now because of covid-19, or the ice on the ground, but that is still no reason to inflict this piece of crap on an unsuspecting populace. I didn't even pay anything to watch this movie, but I still want my money back. That's how terrible this is. Save yourself. Wallace and Grommet is a more grown-up diversion than this. It's not even bad in a way that will make you laugh or entertain you. You'll find yourself looking at your watch to see when it will be over finally.

This movie is so bad that it is not even good.I have watched it twice, just in case I misjudged it the first time round but, only in my opinion, you may feel differently, I have to say that it is a film I would give a wide berth to.

Very happy with the purchase thank you very much

Loved the film

Rubbish film

ok