An Amityville Poltergeist puts a whole bunch of horror tropes together in one movie and doesn’t do a good job with any of them. There’s not a lot of originality and it suffers from a lack of anything happening. Well, a few things happen but they don’t even make sense and just make everything more confusing.

The “plot” of An Amityville Poltergeist revolves around a family that needs someone to house-sit for an old mother (Airisa Durand). When Jim (Parris Bates) takes the job weird and unexplainable things start to happen to him.

If you were at all curious or managed to be taken in by the title, this has nothing in the world to do with either the Amityville or Poltergeist franchises. It’s surely a whole lot easier to simply mash a couple long-running horror franchise titles together and hope for the best than bother with any fresh one, though, and nothing about this suggests there were many original thoughts flying around to spare. In all fairness to the filmmakers, the lame title was probably stuck on by a producer somewhere along the way (everyone gets some blame!).

The characters do not compliment the plot in any way and many of the backstories really aren’t that interesting. The main characters don’t have very complex or real connections. Jim, for instance, has a really hard time connecting a backstory with what’s happening in the events of the movie. Also the women the main character is seeing, Alyson (Sydney Winbush) has very weird motives that really make for odd moments of dialogue.

There are moments in the cinematography where the quality of picture just dropped off tremendously. The camera shakes at points where it doesn’t need to at all. There are times where making bold moments of filming can work really well, but An Amityville Poltergeist would have been better to stick to a more simplistic way of filming. The scares do have their moments in the film. Most of the time it’s just a quick jump scare, but it’s really the music throughout that does most of the heavy lifting there.

There are a lot of horror movies and I’ve seen a fair share–both bad and good. This one is not even really worth watching. It’s boring to get through and the scares are not worth the plot. Overall, An Amityville Poltergeist might be fun to watch with some friends with a few drinks but otherwise I would recommend skipping this one.

3 out of 10