What can be said of Amityville: The Awakening? For people with bad spurs of insomnia, this will surely numb their senses enough to fall into la-la land by the time the end credits roll.

The film is set in the Amityville house, where the horrific true life event of 1974 happened, and the residing family was massacred by its eldest son. We soon learn that the house is sold and has new residents made up of a widowed mother Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her two daughters – one a teenager, Belle (Bella Thorne) and the other younger, Juliet (Mckenna Grace) – and Belle’s comatose twin brother, James (Cameron Monaghan).

Joan is obsessive for the welfare of her son and sees nothing beyond him. While Belle wants to move on with their lives and let James move on as well. However, the bad spirit in the house has other ideas. When the family has settled in, James starts to show signs of improvement, which was medically impossible, while at night something dark is seen moving around, causing hallucinations.

Unbeknownst of the history of the house, (the family had moved-in from another city) Belle is soon illuminated to the fact by her new school friends Terrence (Thomas Mann) and Marissa (Taylor Spreitler). They even want to watch the movie made upon the house, in the same house. And they dare select the original The Amityville Horror and not the remake with Ryan Reynolds – their choice of film, was by far the real horror of the whole movie (the original was atrocious).

Belle then realises that the house has supernatural problems when she has too many weird dreams and occurrences that she can’t explain.

Made after many reshufflings and rewritings, Amityville: The Awakening has zero scares and zero redeeming points to make it watchable. Its direction is best described as amateurish, and the tone is more suitable for a TV slot rather than a theatrical feature. The 2005 Amityville Horror was far superior to the 1979 original. Amityville: The Awakening started with a good idea on paper, but at the end bad acting and even worse writing put a death to any promising aspects.

Director and writer Franck Khalfoun’s past venture P2 was a gritty and tense story of a woman trapped in a parking lot with a psycho stalker. The movie had ambience, but this is just a pale and scare-less movie – two aspects, which become the death for any horror movie. •