Amityville Terror doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Amityville haunting of previous horror movie fame. The story concerns Todd (Kaiwi Lyman) moving his family across the country to live with his troubled sister Shae (Amanda Barton). She's renting an old house an the end of a cul-de-sac for a surprisingly low monthly rate. Todd's teenage daughter Hailey (Nicole Tompkins) isn't at all happy with the move, and doesn't get along with her aunt Shae. And then weird things start happening around the family. Shae, in particular, seems to be acting strangely, the house seemingly causing her to grow violent.
The idea that a house might cause someone to grow violent is the extent with which this film invokes the spirit of the Amityville haunting. The film is really just taking advantage of the familiarity people have with the location, the story otherwise doing little to capture the tone or the essence of the story as it's been told before. It basically just plays out as your standard low budget, direct-to-video horror movie, with the added baggage of a subpar high school new girl narrative to make things even less scary.
The weirdest thing about this movie is that everyone in town seems to know that there's something wrong about this house. In fact, the film suggests that everyone is complicit in basically murdering these families. It doesn't really explain why people are okay with this, or how this series of murders don't attract national attention. The film isn't very concerned with making any sense. The plot is pretty aimless, the film never really resolving any of the issues it brings up in the first act.
This movie is essentially about Hailey, and her dissatisfaction over having to move across the country for the sake of her aunt. The movie mainly follows her as she struggles to adjust to her new surroundings. She goes to school and becomes ostracized for being the new girl. She makes one friend, who immediately becomes a romantic prospect. One might notice that none of this really has much to do with being inside a haunted house. The ostensible main character of this movie barely even spends time inside the main setting of the horror. For obvious reasons, this is a very questionable choice.
Even when the film does spend time in the house, it struggles to be scary. It just doesn't have a lot of tricks up its sleeve. Its biggest scenes rely on poorly done visual effects. The direction is terrible, its scenes generally too bright to suggest anything remotely spooky. The acting is standard for one of these features. Everything is stilted, the film really falling part when any of these actors are made to emote in any substantial way.
Amityville Terror feels like it doesn’t even want to be a horror movie. It spends so much time away from its central setting, distracted by all manner of things that have little to do with scaring people. But it’s more than happy to use the name recall of Amityville to sell itself to prospective viewers. This is an awful, cynical film. It doesn’t show any love for the genre that it’s taking part in, and exerts as little effort as possible in its creation. Horror fans ought to be offended.
My Rating:
