The Amityville Curse

My expectations for any new movie with Amityville in the title are generally low, and knowing this one was brought to us by a free streaming service I figured it would look low budget. And I was right, it does, and the script is nothing more than serviceable, paint-by-numbers, haunted house horror fare. The set-up is minimal before things begin going bump in the night, and the swift pacing remains fairly consistent throughout the brief 90-minute runtime. What works best here is the cast, each of whom had to realize this project would be nothing more than a marginal paycheck. They all turn in credible performances considering the rather thin writing. A no-harm, no-foul Amityville movie that does nothing more than pass the time on a rainy day.

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.

No surprise this is another hopeless instalment of the schlocky Amityville Horror movie series. The first one from 1979 is far superior than the rest, but that's not exactly a compliment. Granted, for its time it had good points but it didn't work for me like Halloween or The Exorcist. This one, Amityville Curse actually starts off ok. I liked how they took the pus out of the story and just went off on a different tangen and at least tried to offer something different. The dialogue and acting were ticking more boxes than not for the first 45, but after that, the whole thing crashes down the chimney and the staircase into the red hellgate basement room.

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.

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.