Amityville The Awakening (2017)

A new family, one headed by a lethargic Jennifer Jason Leigh as mom, moves into the Amityville Horror house and over the course of a perfunctory 87-minutes, the son, brain-dead, bedridden, unresponsive and hooked up to machines in the front room, starts to show signs of improved condition, leading his twin sister Belle to suspect dark forces are at play and luckily her new school friends have seen and read all the books and movies in the series and so can catch her up on the based-on-a-true-family-massacre paranormal story. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Amityville Horror (2005)

Given the entire series is built upon the premise of providing a paranormal 'out' for a real-life family massacrist, I shouldn't be surprised Ryan Reynold's George Lutz gets such an easy reprieve for dog murder, a wanton and unnecessary Russian Roulette axe game, and emotional and physical spousal abuse ("It was just a bad bout of pinkeye, honey - I won't do it again," you can imagine him saying as the boat speeds away to the non-satanic side of the lake where men like him continue these behaviours of their own accord), but apart from this unchecked male violence, this update of the 1979 horror classic incorporates some great improvements: a thankfully truncated 89-minute runtime; a terrifically improved, gleefully sinister babysitter scene; a sculpted Ryan Reynolds waddling around in pajama bottoms (unless you prefer a sculpted James Brolin waddling around in his y-fronts), and gone is all that "I've gone blind," twaddle with the priest.

★★★☆☆

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