Amityville: Maison des Horreurs

The main characters fan girl over the lore and history of the house, taking away from unexpected terror. We know exactly what to expect with this movie. There is no build up to the suspense and you can expect supernatural occurrences at the start of the film. The story takes too long to really tell us any significant background on the group of friends to get us to like them enough to care about their pending demise. When the spooky stuff begins, it's more childs play with no direction. It's jump scare after jump scare. The CGI is very low quality and I feel like there were things they could have done practically with the use of effects makeup.

Right, well I have to admit that I wasn't exactly harboring the biggest of expectations to this 2023 horror movie titled "The Amityville Curse", given the fact that the many "Amityville" movies, since the original and the remake, have been utter rubbish. Yet, I still opted to sit down and give the movie a fair chance.

And sure, I managed to sit through all 90 minutes of the movie, though I was only slightly entertained. Yeah, the storyline in "The Amityville Curse", as written by Dennis Heaton and Hans Holzer, wasn't exactly the best of storylines, nor the most thrilling either. Sure, it was watchable for what it turned out to be, but it was by no means a great movie.

The acting performances in "The Amityville Curse" were fair enough. There was only a single performer on the screen that I was familiar with, and that was Brendan Fehr, and he was hardly in the movie.

Visually then you're not in for anything grand. The movie does make use of special effects, but they are not impressive, nor among the worst of effects I have seen in movies.

All in all, then "The Amityville Curse", from director Éric Tessier, was a bland movie that came and went without leaving much of any noise. It is a movie that is very easily forgotten within a short time after having seen it. And it is essentially just another "Amityville" run-of-the-mill movie, that is nowhere near the level of the original or the remake.

My rating of director Eric Tessier's 2023 movie "The Amityville Curse" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

This film essentially begins with several friends buying the infamous Amityville house with the intention of renovating it in their spare time to resell afterward for a hefty profit. At least, that is their plan. What none of them count on, however, is the nightmares that begin to occur the very first night they stay there--or the strange deaths that occur immediately afterward. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this remake of the 1990 film was actually a little bit better than the first for a couple of basic reasons. For starters, the writing was a bit more polished. Additionally, the characters were a bit more likeable as well. Of course, that isn't saying much since the none of the characters in the first film were really that likeable to begin with. Where the film suffers, in my opinion, is due to the overall lack of suspense which is almost critical to a horror movie of this type. That being said, while I certainly don't consider this to be a terribly bad film overall, it's not something that impressed me that much either--and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

The Amityville franchise has always been an "also ran." This movie really showcases why this series is largely ignored. While the idea of a haunted house with a disturbing legacy is a trope, this production is marred by far more weaknesses.

The cast is merely "ok." The characters are a bit of an odd mix of semi-obnoxious to bland. All-told, no character is engaging or memorable - and I'm including the house itself as a character! This movie rests on the laurels of previous history and films, as a kind of narrative shortcut. The dark past of the house is only casually referenced, so viewers are expected to see "the house" as a credible threat by virtue of the other films or folklore.

Once past the opening sequence, the film plods about. The majority of the early chills come from poorly executed jump scares; namely things falling off shelves. A few ghostly whispers are oddly explicit, the words are crystal clear, and just a bit too well-spoken. Rather than conveying vague suggestions or even indecipherable murmurs, the whispers deliver Scrabble-worthy vocabulary.

The special effects are laughable. I am usually quite forgiving of SFX that are restricted by a paltry budget. In the case of "Curse," the money was not well-spent. The ghostly presences are distractingly poorly depicted.

All told, this film is just incompetent. It's not able to build a necessary sense of dread or mystery about the House. The cast are uninteresting, and the chills are poorly executed all around. While the Amityville franchise has never been particularly strong, this entry is a straight-up waste of your time.

I think this is Tubi's effort to prove with a minimal amount of investment that they could make an Amityville film that is still waaaay better than the majority of Amityville cr@pfests that are out there, a lot of them currently in the Tubi roster themselves.

The gore wasn't bad, the blood was the right colour, the special effects were low grade... however, it would have been nice if they made one that isn't a reboot of one of the 'canon' films... even for the sake of parody, like "The Amityville Diaper" or "The Amityville EV" or "The Amityville POTUS"...

and i think anyone who gives this a really low score has not seen any or many of the other mockbusters that continue to be churned out.