The Amityville Asylum (2013)

In my review of The Amityville Haunting, I basically said it was the worst of the franchise up to that point and that I hoped it would get better. Somehow this movie is even worse than that one was as they somehow manage to keep lowering the bar. I’m beginning to question my life choices. 

The movie starts off with a next to no budget reenactment of the murders of the DeFeo family. Then it moves to “today” where a woman is interviewing for a job as a custodian at a mental facility. She sneezes a big ball of snot on her potential new boss and gets the job. After an extended bit of training on industrial cleaners, which we get to watch uninterrupted by any story or character development, she starts working. There she sees a little girl who can’t be there, a woman who died earlier that day, and suffers some workplace sexual harassment. Then we find out that the doctor who runs the place is evil and there is some sort of native American based religious cult. Oh yeah and the asylum was built on the land where the house used to sit. You know “that” house… which is how they tie this one into the franchise. 

This movie is garbage. At almost two hours long it doesn’t have a plot that would support a short film. I’ve already mentioned the tutorial on cleaning products including how dangerous some of them are. I kept waiting for that to pay off, but it never does. That is terrible writing and even worse storytelling. We also get extended bits with some of the criminally insane patients saying horrible things about their naughty bits that also never comes into play. Why is it there? Did someone just think this dialogue was cool? That certainly is how it feels. These are just a couple of specific examples of the completely boring and seemingly disconnected scenes that are haphazardly stitched together to try and make a plot. None of it works and because of that it was a miserable slog to sit thru The Amityville Asylum. 

Totally a normal doctor with no evil agenda...

What else can I say? Well, the cast is terrible. No one has a bit of inflection to their line delivery as it seems that the entire cast is sleepwalking thru their scenes. I suppose that might have been a conscious choice to fit with the overall bleakness of the proceedings, but it was a terrible idea. Even when she is supposed to be scared or angry the lead actress has the same God-awful monotone voice that tries it damnedest to put you to sleep. There are also scenes where the music, which is already intrusive and doesn’t fit the scenes, is so loud that it bleeds over the dialogue so you can’t hear what the actors are saying. This may have been a purposeful decision to cover up some dialogue that apparently didn’t fit after the availability of an actor changed. But damn it you just don’t do shit like that. Lazy filmmaking pisses me off. 

I could go on, but I won’t. Skip The Amityville Asylum as it is a horrible waste of time. God I hope that there are at least some amusingly bad movies to come. I mean there are thirty more of these damn things at last count so even by accident one of them has to be good… right?

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