I Used To Sit And Talk With You

I know we're full-tilt into our Children of the Corn marathon and you're just dying to know what happens next, but first I think it's due time we catch up on the newest entry in last year's marathon, which got kicked around the schedule so much after it was filmed in 2014 that I was pretty well convinced it would never actually be released at all. I was wrong.

Year: 2017

Director: Franck Khalfoun

Cast: Bella Thorne, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mckenna Grace 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Previously on The Amityville Horror...

Following a trilogy of mediocre but increasingly entertaining films, the franchise goes nuts with a half dozen increasingly inane direct-to-video and TV movies, the best of which involve evil objects from the original house (keep an eye out for a haunted clock, a haunted floor lamp, and - my personal favorite - a haunted mirror), until it hits the mid-2000's and one truly egregious remake. Cue the rise of Redbox, when filmmakers realized the name "Amityville" wasn't copyrighted and churned out about a quarter million knock-offs that I couldn't bring myself to watch. 

Amityville: The Awakening is not quite a sequel, not quite a remake, but it's the first film in over a decade to even seem like a valid part of the franchise proper, whatever that even means. At the very least, it was picked up by Blumhouse, a for-real production company, and its weird half-stab at a meta angle reveals that they at least have the rights to mention and engage with the original Amityville entries. So I'll take it.

Do I have to, though?

So here we have Belle Walker (Bella Thorne), a surly teenager who has moved into a new Long Island home with her little sister Juliet (McKenna Grace), her mother Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her brother James (Cameron Monaghan), who is wasting away in a coma he will probably never recover from. Wouldn't you know it, but the house they move into just happens to be the very same eyeball-windowed home where one Mssr. DeFeo shot up his family forty years ago. 

James' condition seems to improve almost immediately, but is he really getting better, or is his hollow shell of a body the perfect conduit for whatever demon/ghost/CGI blob wants to gain human form and wreak bloody havoc? I daresay it wouldn't be a spoiler to say that yes, it's totally a demon ghost thing. Bella wants to do what's best for James and mercy-kill him, but her super intense mother refuses to allow that to happen.

But it's a Jennifer Jason Leigh character. The descriptor "intense" can be assumed.

As I briefly touched on earlier, this film is aware of both the events of the Amityville murders and the film franchise that sprung from it, in a twist that is reminiscent of the other Blumhouse remake-quel The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Of course, it does almost nothing with this. The fact that the movies exist has exactly as much impact on the story as the fact that the original case happened in the first place. But we do get a scene of the requisite teen friends having an ill-advised slumber party to watch the original 1979 film in the living room of the actual Amityville house.

I'm suddenly having a bad acid flashback to last year's marathon.

But of course this goes nowhere. Nothing in the movie goes anywhere. Not even the character pictured above, who vanishes from the film along with a third, female friend (good riddance though, because he's a textbook example of a toxically annoying randy teen). All we get for the entire first 70 minutes of this features are dream sequence after dream sequence in an endless display of tired scare gags that are so dull and repetitive that they might as well be the cast of Cheers for how familiar and un-scary they are.

And I know the movie has been on the shelf since 2014, but it feels like the script has been sitting there since the mid-90's, especially as it concerns Bella Thorne's character. She wouldn't be out of place as one of Cher's classmates in Clueless, and her black lipstick with matched endless angstifying wear thin within seconds. The only human being in this movie with any sort of personality is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's in just enough of the movie to make you feel like it's not a cameo but you still want way more. Sure, she's coasting, but JJL on autopilot is worth a hundred fake CGI scares.

Scarewise, at least the finale sequence has some tension to it (because that's the only time in the movie that anything is actually happening to our protagonist without her waking up in bed and shaking it off the millisecond the jump scare is over), as well as above-average special effects, but it's certainly not enough to recommend a movie that is this painfully lethargic. And none of it ever reaches the point of actively scary.

MAYBE it's scary if you remember that the little girl she's clutching also played Young Tonya Harding in last year's I, Tonya.

Amityville: The Awakening is like a horror film on Xanax. Everything is ground down into a gently monotonous sea with no highs or lows to speak of. Even the cinematography seems to reflect this, with the daylight scenes being just as grey and washed-out as the scenes set in the basement in the middle of the night. 

The film doesn't even feint at the potential to pick up on the original's theme of economic despair and update it for the health care struggles of the current time. Ditto the tossed-off line referencing Belle's trendily dark backstory involving revenge porn. But that's probably too much to ask for a movie that thinks exposition is a character reminding her own mother that she has a twin. 

Amityville: The Awakening isn't the worst of these (how could it be?), but it's definitely a waste of precious time and chock full of people both in front of and behind the camera who deserve a much better showcase of their talents. Or any showcase at all, because this is hardly a film, just a loose burlap sack of horror tropes that were already weathered and aged back when the original Amityville came out thirty-nine years ago.

TL;DR: Amityville: The Awakening isn't the worst film in the franchise by a long shot, but it's a weak entry that doesn't justify its return after twelve long years.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1094

Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

Her?

Year: 2015

Director: Ari Sandel

Cast: Mae Whitman, Bella Thorne, Robbie Amell

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

It's been a while since we've had a truly great high school film. 

And it will still be a while before we get one, because The DUFF never manages to truly escape the colossal shadow of Easy A. But, if you ignore the hyperbolically insistent fat-shaming of a normal-sized human being at its core, The DUFF is a disarmingly sweet and tentatively modern little comedy at least worth a pity watch during a Redbox binge.

I mean, she can't have spent more than $1.29 on those overalls so why pay more than that to watch her in action?

The DUFF tells the story of Bianca (Mae Whitman, who has been playing a high school student for a decade now - Hollywood is a weird place), a horror nerd who has trouble making conversation with people who don't know who Bela Lugosi is. Not that I would know anything about that, I was a super cool jock in high school.

Bianca's two best friends are Jess (Skyler Samuels) and Casey (Bianca A. Santos of Ouija), who are, let's say, hot enough to be cast members of Ouija. When Bianca's douchey jock neighbor/reluctant childhood best friend Wes (Robbie Amell) informs her that she is a DUFF, or Designated Ugly Fat Friend (whose purpose is to make her friends look hotter by comparison), she goes into a downward spiral. Her actions are loosely based around the five stages of grief, but this plot structure drifts away into the wind after Robbie Amell shows his abs.

I mean, I'd get distracted too, but I'm not a professional screenwriter. Keep it together, guys.

What ends up happening is that Bianca offers to tutor Wes in chemistry in exchange for him helping her learn how to be pretty and popular. Quid pro status quo, if you will. Or maybe you shouldn't. When Queen Bee Madison (Bella Thorne) gets wind of Bianca spending time with her soon-to-be boyfriend, she flips out, sending one of her flying monkeys to spread embarrassing viral videos of Bianca and destroy her reputation.

She pursues her hottie crush Toby (Nick Eversman) while dealing with the inevitable feelings that come to light concerning one Wesley McPecNeighbor. Oh, and Bianca is assigned to write an article for the school paper about "What Homecoming Means to Me," because the screenwriters took a brief pause in their Easy A marathon to pop in Never Been Kissed.

What ensues is a largely pleasant, intensely forgettable experience. I'm happy that Mae Whitman has finally been given a shot to lead a wide release movie. After her standout performance as Ann Veal on Arrested Development 900 years ago, she certainly deserves it. And I can get behind any Hollywood comedy about female friendship, though the premise of the film is dubiously progressive at best.

Come one, come all! Marvel at how ugly and fat and... designated this human woman is!

Although The DUFF takes most of its story cues (and many visual moments) directly from the hallowed halls of high school film history, at least it had the good sense to choose the best ones. It's a lukewarm mash, for sure, but the tropes it cherry picks were enjoyable once and continue to sparkle, at least enough to keep the film modestly entertaining for 90 or so of its 100 minutes. It will never be held to the same level of idolatry as Mean Girls or Pretty in Pink, but its "who cares what other people think?" message is still an important one to send to the youth of today.

Unfortunately, the youth of today might find that they have very little in common with the bronzed, overaged facsimiles of teenagers that populate this universe. As tends to happen when inveterate adults attempt to write about modern technology, the references to social media are frequent, forced, and bewildering, like a James Franco lecture tour.

There's a couple pristine jokes in there about Twitter and such, but one gets the sense that none of the crew members are old enough to have teen daughters. It's a darn shame, because they could have instantly pointed out that A) There's no notification when somebody unfriends you on Facebook, B) It makes zero sense to ask how many hits a YouTube video has gotten while it's in the process of being filmed, and C) In no rational universe would the exchange "Viral?" "Viral." ever happen outside of the fever-addled nightmares of Rebecca Black.

At this point, The DUFF has more speculative science fiction than Interstellar.

There's some interesting integration of UI and dubstep imagery into the film, so credit where credit is due. But for the most part, the techie side of the script will remind teens of what it's like when grandma calls, asking how to get her Air Supply records out of the iTune.

Also, in all honesty, Bianca is kind of a selfish jerk. The way she holds her end of the bargain is by handing Wes her chemistry notebook and prancing away into the sunset to cry about the friends that she abandoned. After all the work he puts into helping her achieve her goals, it's actually really unfair. And her irritation with anybody who can't list the major landmark zombie films of the 1970's in alphabetical order is not a healthy way to get through life. At least the set designers did their research, filling her room with genuine horror nerd posters (Shock Waves! Nice!) instead of super generic mainstream fodder that she'd almost certainly hate.

"The Walking Dead is for chumps. I don't even own a TV."

But Whitman's performances outshines her character's writing and she brings a comic spirit and humanity to the character that renders her chemistry with the green Amell entirely natural.

Oh, also Ken Jeong and Allison Janney are in the movie, as Bianca's teacher and mother respectively. But Janney is sidelined for the bulk of the run time, and Jeong can't find anything unique to do with a character who isn't a borderline psychotic. 

All in all, The DUFF is exactly what you'd expect from a February release. B-level stars doing an OK job with a decent script, but nothing special. I'm glad it exists, and I'd watch it again at a slumber party or something, but I'd definitely keep my Twitter open while it was playing.

There. That's how you be a teenager. Case closed.

TL;DR: The DUFF is a listless mishmash of high school teen movie tropes, but it's a pleasantly generic experience.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? No more than $5, but sure, go for it.

Word Count: 1124