The Amityville Terror (2016)

They keep making these Amityville knock off flicks and I keep watching them. This time around the movie kicks off with a man and woman trying to flee a house while things fly all around them. The lady stops when a little boy calls her Mommy and beckons her back. She goes, the door slams, and she is toast. The next scene is us being introduced to our main characters. This consists of a man, his wife, their teenage daughter, and the man’s sister who is just out of rehab. Apparently, she is a drunk.

Weird stuff happens not long after moving in. This includes a real estate agent who may know more about things then she is admitting too, some brother sister action that seems to be a must for these Amityville movies, some teenage bullying, and a local girl named Jenny who tries to help. FYI Jenny gets tossed out the window for her troubles. What is happening? Are the locals in on it? Will anyone survive? How many times will the real estate lady get naked? You will just have to watch this one to find out.

The Amityville Terror wasn’t horrible compared to most of the previous entries. Though let’s be honest that isn’t a high bar to clear. The story is familiar, but the pacing is decent. This movie clocks in at a decently tight eighty-four minutes. After that seemingly unrelated family from the opening the story wastes no time establishing the characters and defining their relationship to each other. There is also a bit of a mystery when it seems that some folks, like the man’s boss and Jenny act as if something is up. I suppose a spoiler warning is in order. See the real estate lady is evil and she is renting the house to people knowing that they will be killed there. For some reason many of the other locals are aware and, in some cases, seemingly in on it.

The above leads to some bloody mayhem including some guts, a beheading, some crossbow shenanigans, and other fun tidbits. Some of the effects are cringeworthy CGI but others are pulled off okay for a lower budget movie. The idea of feeding the house isn’t new to the franchise but I think that it is neat how they allow the story to leave the location. Instead of being trapped our main character, the daughter Hailey, gets to pop around town getting her Nancy Drew on! That also helps with the pacing.

If this was just a movie and wasn’t part of the Amityville series (such as it is…) I don’t think that I’d recommend The Amityville Terror. But this review and movie aren’t in a vacuum, so I’d be remiss in not considering that. If you are determined to watch one of these later Amityville movies, then you could do a whole lot worse than this one. With that sort of mediocre recommendation, I’m off to watch another entry. They have to stop making these… right? God I hope so.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

The Amityville Toybox (aka. The Amityville Legacy) (2016)

My nightmare continues as I review yet another Amityville movie here for the site. This time around the universe doubled down on my misery by making me watch a Dustin Ferguson flick. If you don’t know that name count yourself lucky. I’ve already had to sit thru his Camp Blood installments so I’m not looking forward to this.

It starts as many of these “Amityville” movies do with a guy walking around killing his family. Then we jump forward forty years and see a guy giving himself a pep talk in the men’s room. He is on his way to a family reunion/fiftieth birthday party for his father. One of the gifts given at the party is a toy monkey that has cymbals that clap together. He had one just like it when he was a kid and thinks that it is a thoughtful gift. Just like the lamp, clock, and mirror before it the thing came from “that” haunted house in Amityville. Sure enough it has evil attached to it and suddenly Dad is talking to his dead father who convinces him to go on a shooting spree.

He kills everyone, but there is still fifteen minutes to make up the minimum runtime for a feature, so we get some random paranormal investigators at the house. They walk around and there is a possessed hitchhiker upstairs. But that still isn’t enough so a random old guy at a factory who is up to no good. With some extra long end credits that gets us to the necessary runtime. Do those last two things have anything to do with the story? Nope. But since there is a sequel to this movie they must connect there, right? Also nope.

I’ve never watched a Dustin Ferguson movie that didn’t feel padded out with little to no actual story. The Amityville Toybox has that same issue. There is a kernel of an interesting plot here with the family dynamics, but it quickly gets lost in the morass of fully clothed sex scenes, random walking around the house, siblings yelling at each other, and getting ready to go to the zoo. The murders seem to take forever to get to, but that is odd since this part of the story takes up maybe forty-five minutes of the runtime. That is how poorly staged and paced the proceedings are. Nothing happens most of the time and when things do happen it just isn’t good.

The acting is bad with people expressing either anger by yelling and all other emotions with a lifeless stare. Maybe if I had liked any of these characters the movie might have had more impact and therefore been more interesting. The movie is filled with continuity errors, especially shifting between day and night without warning when it is supposed to be a few seconds or minutes between scenes. The audio is sketchy and the camera work as well as lighting leave a lot to be desired. This is just another bad movie in a franchise that I’m regretting taking on more and more as the sequels keep coming. This is another one you can skip.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

Amityville Playhouse (aka. Amityville Theater) (2016)

Still trudging thru these movies and they haven’t gotten any better yet. Here is what happens with this movie. Our main character is Fawn who we meet in a college classroom. The class is dismissed, and we find out that she has inherited a run-down theater from her parents. She and some of her friends are going to check it out, but her professor seems a bit concerned and decides to check the history of the place out. That is a good idea because we have already seen an inspector get killed by something at that very same theater!

The rest of the movie is Fawn and her friends getting killed and turning into spooky ghosts or possessed corpses. While all this is happening, the professor is reading books and figuring things out. When he goes to the locals for help more is revealed and the secret of the spooky Indian demons who live under the town is told. But by the time this happens I didn’t care as I was ready for this snooze fest to be over.

For the love of God filmmakers please hire an editor for your flicks. There isn’t that much story here and somehow, they manage to stretch the run time out to an hour and forty-three minutes long! This is why we get extended sequences of the professor reading books in his hotel room as well as the library. There are also painfully long scenes where our main characters bicker and trip over lines that they clearly can’t deliver. Though the inane dialogue doesn’t help either. We get on particularly annoying soliloquy where one character has to explain to another why calling yet another gay makes him look like a douche. Honestly ten minutes with this cast and I was already rooting for the ghosts to murder everyone. Spoilers… I get my wish in what is a completely predictable and terrible ending.

The not so great cast

What else can I say? The special effects aren’t very special. The director is not great. I’ve already mentioned a bit as to how bad the actors are. This movie is seven years old and as far as I can tell none of the actors have any other credits before or after. Draw your own conclusions from that. Other than the theater being in Amityville, really Canada filling in for New York state, this doesn’t connect to the series much at all. But at this point I don’t suppose that means anything at all.

This is yet another cash in on the Amityville name where some independent filmmaker decides to cash in on whatever crappy ghost movie they have made. This might be one of the worst of the Amityville movies that I’ve watched so far, and that is saying a lot. This is going to be a short review but honestly this one is so bad that I can’t even come up with material to be mad about. Do yourself a favor and avoid Amityville Playhouse at all costs.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

Amityville Death House (2015)

The torture… er I mean marathon continues with this entry from producers Fred Olen Ray and director Mark Polonia. This starts off with Eric Roberts voice telling us that a long dead witch is being allowed to return to the world to kill the descendants of those that murdered her long ago. Then we see a sheriff sitting in front of what I think is a green screen jail cell. He is watching a video of some “kids” when we flash back to them.

Tiffany is going to check in on her grandmother and is dragging some friends along with her. When they get to the house they find the older woman in bed with a spell book nearby. Then some random folks like a knife wielding squirrel hunter and some rednecks get killed in the woods by something. Eventually they end up in the basement where one of Tiffany’s friends turns into a spider and the others do some very silly stuff before the house burns down killing them all. Or does it? Yeah, it has a dumb tacked on ending.

I like Mark Polonia and Fred Olen Ray, but this isn’t their best effort. The story is terrible with nothing happening for long stretches other than them sitting next to the campfire or wandering around the woods/house. I’m not kidding because that is most of what we get. This feels like a project that they came up with on the fly without a script or even a fleshed-out idea of a story. Even at a mercifully short hour and ten minutes with extended opening and end credits meaning the actual runtime is closer to an hour Amityville Death House was a chore to get thru.

The cast is forgettable which is both a bad and good thing. They aren’t good, but also not bad enough to have stuck with me for more than five minutes after I shut off the flick. They feature Eric Roberts name prominently, but he phones it in, literally. They have him do a voiceover a few times during the movie to move the plot along and try to fill in the gaps. It is clearly not him in the hooded robes holding the special edition Anchor Bay Book of the Dead Evil Dead DVD. I’m not kidding. That is the prop they use for the demon who lets the witch come back to Earth and who is voiced by Eric Roberts.

Spider lady!

You might have figured out with the last little tidbit above that the production values are bad on Amityville Death House. There is a lot of CGI which is especially bad when they try to show the house burning down. Guys if you can’t afford to properly shoot the script you then modify it rather than force some digital garbage down the audience’s throat. Also why cast a young actress as Grandma and then slather terrible makeup on to “age” her up a bit? You really don’t know an older lady that can lie in bed. There is little to no dialogue involved. The kills are also tame and just off screen. The only thing I sort of liked was the spider lady. It was cheesy but sort of fun.

This isn’t the worst of these movies that I’ve watched so far. But that bar is an easy one to clear. Do I recommend Amityville Death House? Nope. There are far better movies to watch. Hell there are far better Mark Polonia and Fred Olen Ray movies to watch! Skip this one and check out something else from their catalogs.

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

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?

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

The Amityville Haunting (2011)

Damn it! I suppose it was a matter of time before someone thought it would be a good idea to make an Amityville flick that was also a found footage movie. As you may already know if you have been hanging out at Crappy Movie Reviews, I’m not a fan of found footage. I’ll give them props when they are done right, but in my experience that isn’t very often. Well let’s see what we have here.

The story starts off with some kids sneaking into “the house” which looks nothing like the Amityville house at all. They get up to some sexy shenanigans and then something bad happens. What is that? Who knows we just see them yanked away from their phones… because you know everyone films themselves having sex when trespassing? Next up we see a family looking to buy the house. Even after the real estate agent drops dead in the driveway they still fall in love with the place. I suppose that explains why they don’t leave when the doors keep opening by themselves, the daughter’s boyfriend ends up as a pasty pile of dried blood in the backyard, and of course they find the phone with footage of the kids from earlier. Yep, no reason to leave the house… none at all. There terrible decisions lead to the predictable bad ending.

Not to sound like a broken record but I dislike found footage movies for a couple of reasons. First it is used as an excuse to not have a proper story with a beginning, middle, and end. The excuse of “its supposed to be real” is always tossed up as the reason filmmakers making these don’t have a plot with characters. Here this is on display with a family of unlikeable characters doing insanely stupid things that make no sense. This is only made worse when they use the most annoying character, the preteen son with the camera, as our narrator. When I say narrator, he does these odd confessional style monologues to try and fill in the plot between random bits of footage. When they do try and string together some sort of cohesive narrative, they screw it up. For example, we are told that they can’t afford to move, which is why they have to stay. Only to see the father install what has to be a very expensive security system to record what is happening in the house. Sure, that makes sense.  

Lets watch the characters watch the movie

The second issue here is that again the filmmakers lean into the found footage genre to cover up the fact that they clearly had no idea how to shoot a movie. The audio is awful, and it is hard to hear the dialogue at times. Also, like many found footage flicks the camerawork is enough to make you motion sick as the camera never sits still long enough to see what is going on. Sort of hard to make a scary movie when I can’t even see what is supposed to be spooky. This is also used to cover up the lack of budget and any special kills or effects. This is just lazy filmmaking.

This is the worst of these movies so far. I’m beginning to question the wisdom of this marathon. Hopefully they get better, but I hear things… bad things. Until next time heed my advice and don’t spend your valuable time watching The Amityville Haunting.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

Amityville 8 aka. Amityville Dollhouse (1996)

Ladies and Gentlemen, the shit show continues with yet another entry into the Amityville franchise. This time we have a new family that builds their house on the foundations of the infamous haunted house that we all know and love. There is also a shed outback that has a dollhouse that looks awfully familiar. When the car mysteriously starts and smashes the youngest daughter’s birthday bicycle the quick-thinking parents swap out the dollhouse as her gift. Those tricky ghosts!

Things start to get strange when the dollhouse begins to take over. There are demons that seemingly can bounce between both places. Initially they don’t notice the changes happening but then the cracks begin to show. This is also a blended family with one young son wishing he could see his real dad, who he apparently remembers more fondly than he should. I’m sure that the ghosts/demons won’t take advantage of that! There is also a spiritualist sister and her husband who are able to lend a hand when shit gets really weird.

Just in case you haven’t noticed yet I do like a cheesy movie. Amityville Dollhouse is certainly that. The story is utterly predictable as it zips thru the runtime checking all the boxes that we would expect from a movie in this franchise. And yes, that does include some alluded to incest feelings, this time stepmom to stepson… so I guess it really isn’t. Though it is still creepy. There are the bumps in the night and some scares, though I was a little disappointed in the latter. We do get a funny gag with a wasp cockblocking a dude with the only way to save him is by pouring booze down his ear hole. I’ve not seen that before so kudos movie. And of course, the dead ghost dad tries to get his son to kill the family. I mean that is an Amityville tradition.

I realize that the review doesn’t sound terribly positive at this point. But here is the thing about this one. It never for a minute takes itself seriously and like I said before is cheesy from start to finish. The acting borders on goofy with some of the cast chewing on the scenery. We get some gratuitous gore with a crispy girlfriend that I found fun. The creature design of the demons when we eventually see them is my old favorite “guy in a rubber suit” model. I mean they didn’t overthink this one. It also helps that the pacing is spot on with something interesting happening every minute the movie rolling. Not once in the ninety-two-minute runtime was I bored or looking at my watch. I can’t say that about many of these Amityville flicks so far.

In the end is this a good movie? No probably not. But as a fun way to kill an hour and a half I’ve seen much worse ideas. So far in the franchise this might be my favorite of the bunch. Again, these are all new to me from here on out… except for the remake that is. I’m hoping for some hidden gems over the next thirty-five or so movies. This might have been a terrible idea.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer