film | The Amityville snorer

Alright, AN AMERICAN HAUNTING. Let me see if I understand this "true story" you're selling me.

Okay. So the Bell family of 1810s Tennessee was spooked by some sort of nasty supernatural presence that violently fixated on innocent preteen daughter Betsy. It'd hoist her into the air by her hair, grab her extremities and drag her around the house, and pummel her with the kind of bitchslaps you'd expect to find in a steel-cage showdown between Whitney Houston and Moe from the Three Stooges, attacks which presaged the mysterious poisoning of dear old Daddy Bell in 1820, which, according to the movie's marketing campaign, is the only official case in U.S. history where a spirit caused the death of a human being. Sure, that's all fine and good and sounds like the start of a decent campfire tale, and if director/co-writer Courtney Solomon (Dungeons & Dragons: eek!) knew how to make the narrative emotionally gripping or exciting or relevant for people who watch movies in which spirits cause the death of human beings all the damn time, An American Haunting might've been a passable creepfest. But he doesn't, and it isn't. Sweet merciful crap, it isn't.

Solomon favors rote horror-flick clichés (creaky doors, sinister whispers, sudden loud noises) in the lethargic early scenes, then goes flashy for An American Haunting's remainder, with a swooping point-of-view ghostcam that inexplicably flits between color and black-and-white, and a couple of hallucination segments that confusingly bleed into the characters' waking lives — which ring false, by the way. We're apparently supposed to buy that, though young Betsy (Peter Pan's Rachel Hurd-Wood) is repeatedly victimized and molested by a malicious entity, Pa and Ma Bell (Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek) insist on leaving her alone at night in the attic bedroom. And then there's the "twist" ending that explains the paranormal crud with a ludicrous faux-shock revelation that: A) is decidedly not fact-based, and it's really kind of deplorable for Solomon to pretend otherwise; B) completely negates the preceding 80 minutes if you don't buy it; C) creates gaping plot holes if you do (even if you accept that [blank] can cause [blank], why the hell does [blank] assault [blank], and what's with the wolf and the pilgrim girl?); and D) ultimately sucks harder than the old it-was-all-a-dream standby. Solomon stages a single nifty jolt when a horse-drawn carriage suddenly flips over as it, uh, races away from looming evil, but 10 seconds of greatness aren't enough to keep the other 5,390 from resembling the worst Little House on the Prairie Halloween episode ever.

Oh, I almost forgot: An American Haunting is framed by a pair of awkward present-day sequences that seem to exist solely for a bit of product pimpage on behalf of Absolut Vodka. If the folks at the distillery ever wanna return the favor by featuring the film in one of their clever magazine ads, may i suggest Absolut Idiocy as the theme? D-