I can't help but think that the title of today's movie, Amityville: No Escape, might have been better suited for the last movie in this series. After all, with the whole town being in on the evil plot in The Amityville Terror, there was very little chance of escape there. Instead, we've got... well, you'll see.
The movie claims to be a collection of footage filmed in both 2016 and 1997 in Amityville. The 2016 footage is from a graduate student and his friends who were spending time in the woods there as part of his thesis on fear. The 1997 footage is from an army wife filming their new house (which is of course meant to be the Amityville house) and her experiences there. The movie flips between these two sets of footage throughout - the army wife experiences growing levels of paranormal activity in her new home; the group in the woods experience strange noises and meet strange men with shotguns and creepy little (ghost) girls wandering the woods at night. Will any of these people survive, or will they be nothing more than more victims of the Amityville spirits?
You know how, with some films, you watch them and say to yourself, "This film really wants to be [better and more successful film]"? Well, Amityville: No Escape really wants to be two films - Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. The army wife (and I'm pretty sure we're never even told her name, so little characterisation is given to her) is the Paranormal Activity part, and the group in the woods is, obviously, the Blair Witch Project part. And until the very end of the film, it's a case of never the twain shall meet - and even then, the last shot of the film explains nothing. We might as well have been watching two separate short film for all the continuity they shared with each other (and together, the two storylines only come to 75 minutes).
At the very start of the film, some introductory text informs us that this footage has been put together to document the "inauspicious events" that took place in 1997 and 2016. It goes on to say that, for "marketing purposes" this footage, this evidence of crimes committed, has been titled Amityville: No Escape. If police departments are now having to sell evidence as feature films, then clearly budget cuts for the emergency services are far worse than we thought.
Another thing that's a little odd about Amityville: No Escape is that it's apparently set in our universe - ie. a universe where the whole Amityville story and all the movies are just that - fictional movies, which makes this movie rather meta in nature. Not that it matters all that much, because it's mentioned only once in passing in the whole movie and has no bearing on the plot. The film also makes the claim that Amityville is "the most haunted city in the USA", which is news to the dozens of websites that list haunted places in the US, where Amityville doesn't even make it into the Top 25.
It's another zero-budget entry in the series as well, shown this time by the fact that practically nothing happens on camera. There's a couple of bangs, some howling wolves and a couple of moving objects at one point, and a couple of shots of the creepy little girl (ghost) dressed in white and standing out there in the middle of the night, but that's about it. Whenever someone dies, our Blair Witch-like cast just comes across them lying dead on the ground with some fake blood sprinkled on them and/or oozing out of their mouths. They then emote rather weakly and move on. Seriously, they come across one dead guy in the woods in the middle of the night, and just wander back to their tents while making vague talk about "getting help". Army wife gets an even more ridiculous climax, as the evil spirits actually turn the camera away from her before attacking, so we just hear some screaming and then some thuds. It's the height of lazy filmmaking.
Amityville: No Escape is unimpressive and unmemorable, even in terms of this series in general. Just about the only other thing of note about it is that it shows boobs several times in the start and one shot of full-frontal female nudity, because cheap exploitation is the one thing this series had been missing up until now.
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