‘Hell has come to feed’
An Amityville Poltergeist is a 2020 horror film about a young man who suffers a weekend of horrors after taking a house-sitting job.
Written and directed by Calvin Morie McCarthy (Beware the Boogeyman; Insidious Inferno; Exorcism in Utero; Pillow Party Massacre; Conjuring: the Beyond; Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune; A Haunting in Ravenwood; Jesus I Was Evil). with additional dialogue by Jon Ashley Hall.
The Seventh Street Productions movie stars Parris Bates, Sydney Winbush, J Rebecca Morse, Conor Austin, Jesse Sass, Airisa Durand and Jon Hall.
Plot:
A young man named Jim (Parris Bates) encounters a weekend of horrors after taking a housesitting job from a spooky old woman. While interviewing for the housesitting job, the old woman says that she is not scared about anyone getting into the house, she is more afraid about what is already in the house. As day turns to night, doors start slamming, steps begin to creak, and the ghosts come out to play or kill…
Our review:
Ignore the patently misleading An Amityville Poltergiest foisted upon this film by its distributors, it’s a downbeat (some might say morose) study of disaffected people with the supernatural elements presented more as a backdrop or catalyst for the psychological proceedings. Visuals feebly rehash The Grudge. And there’s a convoluted timeline that requires patience to follow.
Whether you are willing to countenance such an approach will depend on your willingness to go with 89 minutes worth of “stress, anxiety” and “resentment”. Some viewers may find it a worthwhile low-budget life study yet most will feel it’s just a slog with an uninspiring central character.
Ade Smith, MOVIES & MANIA
Other reviews:
“Would it shock you to learn the neon green cast has little to no previous acting experience? Between professional Panavision camera with color-corrected cinematography and shot-on-digital flatness largely reliant on natural light, which way do you think this film leans?” Culture Crypt
“It’s a lot of talking, story progression and the build to climax with tidbits of scary tones interlaced. Plus, you never see anything as gnarly as the DVD cover photo. A good movie nonetheless, but nothing to do with Amityville Horror. Take out the disturbing scenes and this one could exist entirely as a dark drama.” Horror Society
“Amityville Poltergeist was quite slow in dishing out the moments of horror and when they did come they were never that original, even if sometimes they were nice recreations of scenes from other movies. The core cast were fine but with a story that was so hard to follow it was hard to really care too much about any of them.” The Rotting Zombie
“Amityville Poltergeist is so fixated on mental health and gun ownership issues that going into the last few minutes of the film I wasn’t even sure if there was a ghost. We do get an answer in the final frame, but it’s never explained just what was going on or why […] It’s competently made and it does have some effective moments. It just doesn’t have enough of them to keep the film from getting lost in its non-horror elements.” Voices from the Balcony
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