In short: Keep Watching (2017)

The Mitchell’s – father Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), daughter Jamie (Bella Thorne), son John (Chandler Riggs) and stepmom Nicole (Natalie Martinez) – are returning from a vacation to the family home. Things are a bit strained, for Jamie’s not able to get over her father “replacing” her dead mother with Nicole, while Nicole’s clearly trying to pretend she doesn’t notice, like a politician hoping all problems go away if you just ignore them for long enough.

There’s even more stuff of this sort in the first half hour or so, but little of it will matter much for the rest of the movie, mind you, for while the family have been away their house has been rigged with a truly improbable number of hidden cameras and microphones. We the audience already know the Mitchells are going to be the newest project of a gang of masked killers who like to get into fights with troubled rich families, and kidnap the last survivors for a not at all surprising plot twist, streaming their exploits time-delayed on the Internet.

At its core, Sean Carter’s Keep Watching is a perfectly fine low budget home invasion thriller that tries to avoid the class issues of the genre by keeping its killers truly faceless – apart from the one plot twist bit, of course. The hidden camera angle – even though it is nearly absurdly improbable without the bad guys actually having super powers of precognition – works out much better for the film than I would have assumed, pushing it into quite a few original set-ups for shots which also influence the suspense scenes enough they do not feel quite as well-trodden as the plot and the nature of the suspense actually is. The actors are selling the material well too, with some good shadowy looming by whoever plays the masked people, a much better performance by Thorne’s final girl than we got from her in the last two horror films I saw her in (though one was that Amityville abomination, so that one only a very cynical watcher would blame on the kid), and decent stuff by Riggs and Martinez too.


So most of the film is a tight, rather entertaining thrill ride that combines the bourgeois fear of home invasion with vague anxieties about the evil Internet and surveillance, and that’s really all I’d ask of a pleasant low budget number like this one. Alas, the film also adds some elements of psychological mind-fuckery concentrating on Jamie it does too little with to be effective, and which do not actually feed as well into the final plot twist as they should. As plot twists go, I’ve seen worse – at least it has something to do with the rest of the movie – but I’d also argue the plot twist and what is supposed to prepare for it don’t really do much at all for the effect of the film, instead regularly slowing it down for business that just isn’t as riveting as Keep Watching seems to think it is.

Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her daughters Belle (Bella Thorne) and Juliet (Mckenna Grace) and comatose son James (Cameron Monaghan) move into the Amityville House. In this parallel world, the “actual” Amityville hauntings happened, and the movies about it were made too. Still, Belle manages not to realize what the place is all about until she’s ostracized in school because of it.

That’s not the only thing that’ll make the girl’s life difficult, though: there’s clearly something wrong between her and her mother that goes beyond the kinds of tension that develop between mothers and daughters. Why, would you believe it might just have something to do with the state James is in (though not as much as the film hints at)? Then there are of course the expected variations of the usual Amityville shenanigans mostly concentrating on Belle and Juliet. Flies, the red room – you’ve seen it in another Amityville film, it’s in here in one form or the other. The most potentially frightening threat to Belle, though, is what happens to James. He should never be able to wake from his coma again, but after some time in the house, he clearly starts to regain a part of his consciousness, if not his mobility. Is it really James, though, or is his body…possessed? Well, what do you think.

Franck Khalfoun’s new film in the franchise that by now has spawned more unofficial sequels than official ones has graced studio shelves for a couple of years now, with various reports of cuts, recuts and lowered age ratings spicing up the tale. That suggests a complete train wreck of a movie, but for most of its running time, The Awakening not a bad movie so much as a painfully mediocre one that seems not to know at all what it wants to be: a generic modern mainstream ghost horror film like The Conjuring et al but with awkwardly timed jump scares and less ad space for dubious faith healers? A more interesting psychological horror film about the price a family has to pay for the poisonous mixture of love, guilt, desperation and a mother’s inability to let her son go? Some meta-horror film where characters in the Amityville house watch the original Amityville Horror (and where nothing of interest apart from a blunt scare and a half comes of that)? A film that puts teenage Bella Thorne in hot pants and bizarre skimpy outfits and leers at her as often as possible? Apart from that last one, I couldn’t help but get the impression that Khalfoun didn’t know either, which is a bit of a problem seeing he’s the director and writer of this thing.

Because the film can’t really decide what kind of movie it wants to be, or even what tone it is aiming for, the only thing it manages to achieve is to waste a lot of potential. It is not difficult at all to imagine an effective, perhaps even emotionally involving horror film with The Awakening’s basic plot, but this certainly isn’t that movie. There are so many bad decisions on display here, not just when it comes to the bland direction and the confused script. For example, why try and let as affectless an actress as Thorne carry most of the film while the usually wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh has to chew through a handful of scenes of bad dialogue and badly underwritten characterisation? And if you’re Hollywood-style afraid of middle-aged women in the lead of your film, why not at least hire a more competent actress for the lead? It’s not as if young, talented actresses were difficult to find.


Because all that’s still not quite enough to sink the film, someone involved in the production decided the best way to finish it is on a sequence that feels ripped out of a cheesy 80s Italian haunted house movie (one of the Ghosthouse films, say), and that there’s nothing that fits a bit of supernatural horror better than a finale that sees our protagonist running away from a guy with a shotgun in a scene that makes the shotgun sequence in the original Amityville Horror look subtle, exciting and clever. I have no idea what this thing is even trying to do..