Movie Review: 'Amityville Poltergeist'

In the competition for worst movie of 2021, it’s thus far no contest. The bizarre cannibal rape movie, Scavenger remains untouched as the worst thing I’ve seen this year. Amityville Poltergeist is the one movie thus far that can come close to challenging the title. Amityville Poltergeist however, is not nearly as hateful in it’s terribleness as Scavenger is. Amityville Poltergeist is more incompetent than Scavenger, somehow, but the fact that it doesn’t feature an unending sexual assault and appears to have a three act structure, keeps Scavenger ahead in pure awfulness.

Amityville Poltergeist plays like a high school video project that some shyster producer got his hands on and slapped a title on it that might confuse people into thinking it’s a real movie. And that’s legitimately what happened. The film was called No Sleep in it’s initial creation. It became Don’t Sleep before it was purchased for distribution and it was released in an attempt to capitalize on the titles of past horror classics known for being abused as sequels.

Amityville Poltergeist stars Parris Bates as Jim. In need of some quick cash, Jim looks online and finds an opportunity. Someone has posted an ad looking for someone to act as a house sitter for several days at $500.00 per day. The house is normal enough, it’s owned by an old woman (Rebecca Kimble) who is being forced by her son, Jason (Jon Ashley Hall) to vacate the home for a few days to see a specialist.

The old woman isn’t sleeping, she claims that she’s being kept awake at night by an unseen entity. As she has grown more doddering and confused, Jason has become concerned enough to have her hospitalized for a few days. Why the house, a rather drab split level, needs an expensive house sitter is not established. Regardless, Jim takes the gig and soon he is also hearing things inside the house that he can’t explain.

Joining Jim to help calm his nerves and smoke weed are his friends, Collin (Conor Austin) and Alyson (Sydney Winbush). Jim and Collin have been friends since early childhood but that doesn’t prevent Jim from lusting after Alyson who returns his affections even as she has no plans on breaking up with Collin. Alyson comes to spend the night with Jim while he’s house sitting and their relationship turns physical until both are menaced by whatever being is haunting the house.

Trust me when I tell you that my description is only coherent out of my sheer effort. I’ve given you what I believe the movie intended but a lot of it is conjecture on my part. Amityville Poltergeist is so incompetent that it requires an audience to imply much of what we assume the plot is. That the movie is employing a plot inspired by about a dozen other bad horror movies makes forcing the movie to make sense slightly less of a chore but it’s still far more work than Amityville Poltergeist is worth.

If you’re looking for a good example of how brazenly the distributors of Amityville Poltergeist are trying to capitalize on the horror history of the names Amityville and Poltergeist, there is not one single mention of either Amityville or Poltergeists in the entire 70 plus minute run time of Amityville Poltergeist. Not that the inclusion of either the historic location or the well known take on ghosts would have improved the rotten production of Amityville Poltergeist.

Amityville Poltergeist borders on parody more than a few times. The film earns big laughs when it is going for earnest scares. The film features a villainous evil ghost, a poltergeist of sorts, that is basicaly a low rent version of the girl from The Ring complete with her bone crunching sound design and wet head. Why? Probably because the makers of Amityville Poltergeist are about as original as the distributors who nicked a title for the film intended to fool people into thinking it’s part of two well known franchises.

Amityville Poltergeist will be available for on-demand rental on May 18th, 2021.