Giving Paramount's Rings a run for the most delayed horror sequel of recent times, Dimension's Amityville: The Awakening has been postponed once again. The latest setback for the movie arrives just three weeks before if was due for release. Instead of the re-re-re-rescheduled January 6th launch, Amityville: The Awakening will now debut on June 30th and go up against the likes of Transformers: The Last Knight and Despicable Me 3.

Amityville: The Awakening started life more than five years ago as a found footage sequel/reboot of the original movie. However, The Lost Tapes idea was rejected and a new script was produced with writers Casey La Scala and Daniel Farrands. Production started sometime in the Spring of 2014 with plans to release the movie early 2015. Even though all the footage was in the can, Dimension made the bizarre decision to delay the release by more than a year to April 15, 2016. An extra year of post-production did little good as long before April rolled around, the movie was delayed yet again.

No specific reasons have been cited for the repeated delays, but it's believed that overwhelmingly negative test screenings have been the main driving force. At some stage, we might have to accept that Amityville: The Awakening isn't going to revive the franchise that wasn't in dire need of reviving.

The last time an Amityville movie saw the inside of a cinema was back in 2005 when Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George starred in the moderately successful remake. Since those dizzying highs, it has been a conveyer belt of direct to video efforts, each more diabolically awful than the last. Ordinarily, the seventeenth retelling of The Amityville Horror wouldn't be of huge interest to me, but as this one features Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jennifer Morrison, and Kurtwood Smith, I'm curious to see what attracted them to the material.

Produced by horror maestro Jason Blum and directed by Franck Khalfoun (Maniac), Amityville: The Awakening will be unleashed on June 30, 2017, maybe.