Amityville Haunting

Well the current run on "found footage" movie making has finally hit the Amityville franchise.  Really the two were made for each other.  The Amityville crapola started as a trashy book that was supposedly based on true events that was a hodge podge of every haunted house element there ever was.  It didn't hurt that the house itself had a sinister look so the book sold like the proverbial hotcakes and next came the movie.  The movie was a hot mess but it made money so there came Amityville 2 and Amityville (God help us all) 3-d.  After that it was straight to the bargain bins and eventually they even stopped counting. 

So in this current installment a bunch of teens with cell phones party in the house and are slaughtered in about ten minutes.  Then a nice family movies in but for some reason are not slaughtered instantly.  Instead the son annoys everyone by supposedly filming a documentary and dad puts in surveillance cameras cause the doors keep opening.  We the audience get the occasional goose, but mostly we are just waiting for the ghost whatevers to kill everyone.

There's a reason for this.  Like so many horror films, The Amityville Haunting forgot to put in anyone likable in the cast.  The kid doing the camera work makes everyone want to slap him silly.  Everyone is ranges from annoying to very annoying.  So there's no investment in watching a film where you don't care about anyone.  Yes there are occasional scenes that can make you jump, but its purely an instictual thing and not a "real" scare.  Oh and double negative points for not even really trying to make the house look like the original amityville house.  That's just lazy.

So, a so so film that left me feeling nothing but my benumbed ass.