The folks out at The Asylum sent over another interesting slice of Asylumization, and this time, they’re either super late to the party or really, really on top of things for once. They’ve sent out a copy of The Amityville Haunting, and they’re going the found footage route with it.

The Amityville Haunting takes us out to the infamous house in Amityville, which has since been remodeled so it can’t be immediately recognized. But the folks out at The Asylum don’t seem to care, and have sent out a party to make a documentary of the murders out at the legendary house. The footage that survives the filmmakers, meanwhile, details a night of horror unlike anything they were expecting. But when a whole new family moves in and discovers the footage the first set of filmmakers left behind, they discover that there’s a whole lot going on here that they never saw coming.

Now, it’s pretty clear that, despite The Asylum’s protestations to the contrary, this is almost certainly not real. In fact, this house looks precious little like the actual Amityville house, neither inside nor out. I’ve seen the first few Amityville movies a few times, and my primary question is, where’s the river? The original Amityville house was waterfront. So if this is the real deal, then why is there no water? Oh, and the police reports at the end feature several misspellings, including “extream” for “extreme”, “separtion” for “separation” and somehow, “spinal chord”.

Okay, leave aside the disputation about the reality of the movie for a minute, and instead focus on this one as a movie, and the end result is surprisingly satisfactory. There’s some fine tension built in here, plus some very nice artifacts that are always interesting. I always like when a movie makes you pay such careful attention that you get a little something extra out of it if you rewind it and then go through it with frame advance. It’s not always great, but done properly, it awakens my inner film geek and makes me a very happy camper indeed. The Asylum’s done some excellent stuff with haunted house movies before, and this one is another prime example.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Amityville Haunting an eight out of ten. Sure, it’s not the best movie you’ll see this year, or even the scariest, but for a little good old fashioned late night popcorn crunching, well, you could do substantially worse. Ignore some less than credible dialogue, a somewhat shaky ending, a Chekhov’s Gun sequence that never goes off in the form of the grandfather clock sequence, and a frantic insistence that what you’re seeing is real, and you’re left with a reasonably good haunted house title, easily one of The Asylum’s strengths.