Vincenzo de Divitiis
•The teenager Belle moves to the picturesque coastal town of Amityville, in the state of New York, along with her mother, her younger sister Juliet, and her brother James, who has been in a coma for two years and needs constant care. Belle's integration into her new school is not the easiest, as her classmates tease her because her new home, 112 Ocean Avenue, is considered by all the locals to be cursed and haunted by evil spirits. Urged by a classmate with strange manners, the protagonist begins to investigate the past of the villa and discovers a terrible and shocking truth: in 1974, in fact, the DeFeo family was completely massacred by one of their sons, Ronald. Belle will soon taste the truth of such legends when she begins to be tormented by terrifying nightmares and very realistic hallucinations, and especially at the moment when her brother James miraculously recovers from the coma to the point of being able to get up and return to life. The story of Amityville has thus begun anew, and the evil that dwells within it can once again act undisturbed.
Horror cinema, it is known, has always been characterized and composed of strongly iconic elements, whether monsters, haunted houses, or places with great emotional and evocative charge, and by sagas that have marked the history of the genre and frightened entire generations of viewers. One of these is undoubtedly that of Amityville Horror, which draws inspiration from the real events that occurred in the infamous villa number 112 of Ocean Avenue, where in 1974 the DeFeo family was exterminated by the son Ronald.
A massacre anything but normal and barely rich in mysteries and controversial aspects, if one considers that the dynamics of that night are still very obscure and, even more unsettling, the residence seems to be built over an ancient Indian cemetery whose spirits still linger between those walls and cloud the minds of those who live there. Superstitions, popular beliefs, and macabre legends that could not go unnoticed by horror cinema, which, starting from 1979, the year of Amityville Horror by Stuart Rosenberg, launched a very extensive saga in numerical terms, with nearly twenty titles among those released in Italy and others unreleased in our country, but not always of high quality and rather uselessly repetitive. The attempt to revive this franchise comes this time from the usual BlumHouse, which produces this Amytiville: The Awakening by Franck Khalfoun (whom many will remember for the excellent -2: The Level of Terror and the remake of Maniac), a very skilled and talented French director, but who here limits himself to making a very adolescent product, without great narrative and stylistic elements, and overall flat and predictable.
Given that the starting material, i.e., the original saga, is not the most fervent and brilliant, it must also be said that Khalfoun does not do much to try to raise its quality level, and on the contrary, the French author sets aside his good vein shown in previous films and seems to settle for what are the standards of films marked Jason Blum. We thus witness the usual story of a family moving into a cursed house, the group of naive teenagers looking for trouble, poorly sketched characters, and a story that follows tracks now known to everyone without any type of original and characterized finding, but rather by the usual dynamics between family members. The only positive notes come from the technical department, in particular, it is worth highlighting the photography of Steven Poster, who in some moments manages to create unsettling and slightly frightening atmospheres, and the choice of low-angle shots useful for making the interiors of the house more threatening and frightening.
Rather positive, then, the choice of a cast that includes the beautiful and talented Bella Thorne, as the protagonist Belle, Cameron Monaghan, who plays the terrible brother in a coma James, whose makeup is not entirely convincing, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Mckenna Grace.
Amityville: The Awakening, in conclusion, maintains the mediocre performance of the saga and represents an avoidable chapter and only marketable to young beginners in the genre and looking for some easy scares. Nothing so horrible, it is clear, but from Khalfoun, much more was expected.
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