1/2
Was the Amityville series ever a hot ticket item? I mean, I know the book was a bestseller and the original one did well enough to keep everyone pumping out more movies but was anyone ever flowing in cash as they sunk money into another outing, this time featuring a haunted sofa that ends up in Vancouver and terrorizes a family of vaguely familiar character actors? Even then, the initial series died a quiet death until Ryan Reynolds showed up in a remake. I’m asking because the new wave of Amityville flicks are a sloppy handful of either loosely connected “sequels”, braindead attempts to add to a series that has an incredibly thin narrative or some low-budget flick that whatever production company slaps the name Amityville on to… and here’s where the confusion hits… make money? I haven’t heard anyone clamoring for more Amityville, not even when the original series was throwing out yearly titles. The only people watching these things are dopes like me who don’t mind testing their patience and seeing just how bad it can get. I’m an idiot, please don’t be like me. So what we have here is a movie that was originally titled The Girl from the Other Side and it looks like it’s set in Chicago… there better be a haunted fucking lamp purchased at an estate sale in Long Island. Heather West calls herself a paranormal investigator and since it’s all bullshit anyways, I guess she is one. A missing girl named Maryanne was presumably murdered but with no body ever being found, it remains a heartbreaking mystery. Heather is determined to figure out what happened to the poor girl. After the disembodied screams of what may be Maryanne are heard in the house where she died, the homeowner, Rosa, invites Heather to come and get her investigation on. Heather, when not treating us to an inside look to her boring-ass and moody life, puts her decade of ghost hunting to work and sloooooooooowly attempts to make contact with the other side. Unfortunately for us, the viewer at home, this movie is really interested in Heather’s miserable existence. It doesn’t even to bother to show it all. There’s a bit about her father being dead and instead of watching Heather deal with this grief we get text across a black screen explaining this grief while the kind of music you’d hear while waiting to be transferred to your sales representative plays… what the fuck, movie? Heather finally gets to investigating and I’m now realizing it’s only been thirty minutes of movie so it just felt like we were dealing with Heather’s personal life forever. Still, I blame the movie. Nope. Nevermind. More personal bullshit. Heather makes tea, Heather waxes poetic over a shot of fallen leaves, Heather goes for a jog, Heather has stilted conversations, Heather watches a ghost hunting show that looks like Tubi would have turned away, Heather makes more tea, Heather opens her fridge repeatedly (this is an actual scene. We also get more text letting us know that she started drinking after her father passed), Heather watches the original House on Haunted Hill (super jealous), Heather texts, Heather sits quietly and works on her computer, Heather researches stuff on her laptop, Heather watches Carnival of Souls (again, wish I were Heather and watching anything but this bullshit), Heather makes phone calls, Heather sees a tarot reader, Heather hears whispers, Heather takes a nap (again, jealous), Heather dreams of ghosts and there is no connection, however tenuous to the infamous Long Island haunted house. A dramatic character study with a haunting in the background could work if we gave a damn about the character we’re studying. Weak performances and a general lack of any entertainment further hamper my time with this. The chilly Chicago setting has me fondly looking back on working construction in the city with my buddy and the apartment interiors have me reminiscing about the places I’d wake up after a night out drinking… so you can say this is saved from zero stars by no action on the filmmakers’ part.
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