Carnography

Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

It's finally here. With this review, I've come to the end of what's become the Amityville Horror series review death march. Even then, I've not covered every Amityville movie out there - as well as having to skip Amityville: Vanishing Point because I couldn't get hold of a copy, there's also apparently Amityville Exorcism, from the same people who did Amityville Death House, and Amityville: Evil Never Dies, which is a direct sequel to The Amityville Legacy. And apparently, there's also Amityville Cop, Amityville Creation, Amityville High, Return to Amityville (personally I don't think we ever left), Amityville: The Beginning and Amityville Bulldozer in various stages of development. But for the sake of what's left of my sanity, we're sticking with just the ones on the Wikipedia list.

So yet another family, the Walkers, moves into 112 Ocean Avenue - mother Joan, teenage daughter Belle, twee child Juliet and James, Belle's twin brother who's been in a persistent vegetative state for two years after an accident. Things are already tense in the family due to the fact that Joan blames Belle for James' condition, but then soon after they move in James seems to start slowly coming out of his coma. But is this a miracle of modern medicine, or is it something more sinister? Belle is caught in the middle of everything as she tries to protect her family and prove to her mother that a sinister force has taken possession of her brother, while at the same time trying to figure out some way to save them - and most importantly her brother - from suffering a similar fate to the DeFeo family...

Amityville: The Awakening was originally meant to be released in 2012... then 2014... 2015... 2016... Finally, it got a theatrical release in October 2017 (where it made $742 on opening night), five years after what was meant to be its official release. That's why there were so many cheap knock-offs popping up in those years, as just about everyone with a video camera and their dog wanted to ride on the coattails of the first theatrical, "big studio" Amityville release in years. And after all that, it's not even a particularly good movie.

The portrayal of the character of Belle is particularly problematic for me. First of all, I don't think I've seen a character so blatantly labelled an "outsider" as Belle was right from the start of the film. She's called "Belle" in a family where everyone else's names begin with a "J" - the Hot Topic clothes and make-up are just window dressing at that point. And then there's the slut-shaming - when she was 15, Belle makes a mistake and sends pictures to a boyfriend, who promptly shares them with the internet; brother James goes to confront the guy and gets pushed off a 3rd floor balcony and ends up PVS... but the only one who gets blamed is Belle? I get that they wanted to create tension between Belle and her mother to further the plot, but I think this goes way too far and just makes her mother seem irrationally crazy. Then again, after the "God gave up on us so I decided to pray to the dark powers and move us into the Amityville house to see what would happen" revelation, that might have been the point.

The biggest problem with Amityville: The Awakening though is that, when your alleged antagonist is in a coma for most of the film, it loses a lot of its punch and scare. I know I've complained about cheap jump scares on this blog more times than I can count, but aside from a couple of dream sequences, the film doesn't even have very many of those. Once again, a lot of the scenes are shot in near-total darkness as well, which was bad with the low-budget movies but this one (I assume) had more of a budget than them and Franck Khalfoun as director, so I don't think it's remiss of me to have expected better things. Then again, the movie poster proudly informs me that this is "from the producer of... The Purge" (no, it wasn't Michael Bay, but he's about the only name not listed in the executive producer credits) so I probably should have known better.

Just like the urban legend of the Amityville Horror and the alleged evil that lives within, or below, or around 112 Ocean Avenue, this series is not going to die anytime soon, but maybe it should. After all, with the possible exception of Amityville Bulldozer, I think we've long ago exhausted every original idea and direction this concept can go, and now we're just circling the drain with endless low-budget and low-creativity movies. 18 films and barely a good one to be found.

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Amityville: No Escape (2016)

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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The Amityville Terror (2016)

2016 was quite a prolific year for Amityville knock-offs, as there were no less than four of the buggers released that year. Today's direct-to-video/DVD offering is The Amityville Terror, and I went into it expecting great things, considering that it had a budget of about $500,000. Really.

A new family (I was calling them the Patsies for reasons that will become obvious but apparently they were called the Jacobsons) move from San Francisco to Amityville and move into a house they've been able to rent for a remarkably low price. The house seems nice enough, but of course, there's something sinister living in it as well as them, and the locals aren't particularly friendly and welcoming either. Soon enough there are creepy little girls, slamming doors and power surges, drain cleaner apparently seeping into baths and all the usual things you'd expect from a haunted Amityville house. It turns out that the evil spirits in the Amityville house (or at least this Amityville house, because it's not 112 Ocean Avenue) have gotten to the point where they now act out if no-one is living in the house for them to torment and kill, and so the townspeople 'feed' it tenants to keep them happy and out of their houses. Will the Jacobsons be able to escape the evil fate the house and the town have planned for them?

There's one thing in particular that I love about this movie - the idea that the town of Amityville now advertises in newspapers for people to come live in their evil haunted house. What must that ad look like? "To rent: large spacious house in suburb of Amityville. Very reasonably priced; comes partially furnished. Absolutely no-one has died in it, honest. Sorry, no smokers, pets or priests."

The incest is back again in this movie as well, because it's apparently not an Amityville movie without someone ending up doing it with their sister. One of these days, people who are actually into keeping it in the family in that way are going to move into the place, and the evil spirits just won't know what to do with themselves.

Okay, I'll be honest here - I actually quite liked The Amityville Terror. Granted, my standards after the last several films at least may have dropped somewhat, but the film does have relatively good production values and I at least enjoyed watching it, unlike other recent entries in this franchise which had me fidgeting impatiently in my seat hoping things would end soon. Yes, it does go a bit silly season with the trio of teenage girls joining in on the killing spree at the end like we're watching The Purge: Election Year again, and it makes up yet another family who all got murdered by their son to take the place of the DeFeos, and the climax does feel like a cross between The Shining and The Evil Dead... Look, I'm not saying that the film is perfect, but all things considered, it's not bad.

Another thing I liked about the film was the character of Hailey, the Jacobsons' teenage daughter. We've had female protagonists in Amityville films before now, but Hailey was the first one who felt like a Final Girl to me and not just a screaming future victim. She rides a motorbike and carries a crossbow to protect herself (granted, that last one is a little far-fetched, because I can't imagine her getting very far in school with that in her bag), she goes investigating the history of the house and discovers its - and the town's - dark secret, and she kicks ass in the showdown with the evil spirits at the film's climax. It actually felt quite refreshing to see someone actually fight back against the evil in the house for once, instead of just screaming, whimpering and/or trying and failing to get out a few deaths too late.

Maybe watching 15 Amityville films one after the other in the space of two and a half weeks (and there's still more to come) has done something to my brain. Certainly, a quick glance around the net has shown me that I'm in a minority when it comes to giving any praise to The Amityville Terror at all, which is mildly disconcerting as usually I'm the only one hating a film that everyone else seemed to love. But I'm standing by my opinion - The Amityville Terror isn't the worst film I've seen recently, and right now that's enough for me.

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The Amityville Legacy (2016)

I am disappointed. I spent two days trying to get hold of a watchable copy of Amityville: Vanishing Point, but I had no luck whatsoever. So I've had to admit defeat - at least for the time being - for reviewing that film and, after a day off, I've skipped to the next film on the list, The Amityville Legacy (which has nothing to do with The Amityville Playhouse). Hopefully, we won't have somehow missed anything vitally important in missing a film out...

After we start, as all these films seem to do, with the DeFeo family massacre in 1974 yet again, we jump forward "40 years" and across the USA to Nebraska, where various family members are gathering together to celebrate patriarch Mark's 50th birthday. One of his birthday gifts is an antique toy monkey that just so happened to have come from the house on 112 Ocean Avenue, and so, of course, it's evil. The monkey wastes no time spreading its influence, and soon Mark is angrily chopping wood, insulting his family and having visions of his dead father telling him to kill them all. Between Mark's descent into murderous psychosis and the fundamentalist grandmother who is beginning to suffer from dementia, will the family survive the weekend?

And here we all thought that we'd left the Yard Sale of the Damned behind several movies ago, didn't we? Admittedly, those old toy monkies with the cymbals are almost always evil and creepy - even the one in Toy Story 3 was creepy (and bore a striking resemblance to this one) - so at least this time around we're not struggling to make a horror movie about an evil lamp or an evil clock. Although the toy monkey actually features very little in the actual movie - it's given to Mark, he cuts his foot on it and then we just see it once or twice more, from various camera angles and sometimes being lit with a red or green light. It doesn't actually do anything in the film.

The Amityville Legacy is also a short film, clocking in at just 66 minutes long, or 59 minutes without credits. 59 minutes! That's not even an hour long. It's certainly not long enough to be classed as a feature film by the rules of the Screen Actors Guild, whose minimum is 80 minutes (although it is according to the Academy of Motional Picture Arts and Sciences, who say that their minimum length is 40 minutes). However, the very least that can be said for The Amityville Legacy is that it doesn't pad out its story unnecessarily. Well, there's some padding, but it's not nearly as bad as we've seen in other films.

You've probably already guessed that The Amityville Legacy is also another zero-budget film, and you're right. Unlike some of the other low-budget films we've seen in the Amityville franchise, however, this film doesn't try to do anything with CGI effects or anything like that. The effects are limited to red and green lights in some of the scenes (mainly the DeFeo murders at the start and Mark's dreams/hallucinations) and a bit of fake blood on a couple of bodies. Oh, and some obviously CG blood splatter once or twice. Even Mark's ghostly father is presented fully solid and walking around like a regular person. It might be a bargain-basement film, but at least it's not trying to do anything above its budget that would just end up looking laughable.

Another thing of note is the inclusion of a gay couple in the film who aren't portrayed as offensive stereotypes or as just cannon fodder for Mark's inevitable killing spree (because the entire family are equal targets there). There are some homophobic comments made about them, but they're from Mark's dead father/the evil monkey and so understandable in context. Oh, and there's a scene of mild BDSM between the couple, but again, it's one of Mark's hallucinations that are supposed to be driving him to kill, so it's understandable in context.

Despite what this review might have implied so far, The Amityville Legacy isn't a good film, but when you look at some of the other films we've watched in the past couple of weeks, it's far from the worst film we've seen. The plot and dialogue are awkward and feel forced for a lot of the movie, with a couple of exposition sledgehammers dropped in at random to try to force plot points and fill in a few minutes before the inevitable shotgun rampage. But it feels like it's at least tried to be aware of its limits and stay within them, and at least some of the characters were relatable. And it was short, which after 14 films is something of a relief.

 

 

The Amityville Playhouse (2015)

At this point in the Amityville "series", we appear to have exhausted every possible storyline involving the original house at 112 Ocean Avenue, and so we've now moved on to random surrounding buildings in Amityville, which makes the whole town seem like a somehow undiscovered hotbed of sinister paranormal activity that makes you wonder why people even still live there. Today's haunted building is The Amityville Playhouse, also known as The Amityville Theater and Amityville Legacy.

After Fawn Harriman's parents die in a fire, she inherits an abandoned and run-down theatre in Amityville. Along with her boyfriend Kyle and three of her friends, she decides to visit the theatre and spend the weekend there to investigate it before she decides what to do with it. Being in Amityville, the playhouse is, of course, haunted and the group is soon experiencing strange events and visions, as well as finding themselves mysteriously trapped in the theatre. While all this is going on, Fawn's high school Geography teacher is doing research into the theatre's history for her, despite running into opposition at every turn from the Amityville locals, and he soon discovers a dark secret about the town. But will he be in time to save Fawn and her friends?

The Amityville Playhouse features a day-for-night shot at one point in the film. Day-for-night in 2015. I don't know whether to be impressed or not. It is, however, quite indicative of the level of special effects in this film. Most of the ghostly/demonic effects are done via sound effects only - growls, screams and the usual - nay, inevitable for any Amityville film - buzzing of flies. Later on, a couple of characters get possessed or replaced by evil doppelgangers (it's never really made clear one way or the other), and then their faces get some admittedly pretty impressive make-up effects (although annoyingly, one of them gets an inverted cross branded on her forehead), but that's about it as far as the special effects go.

The film clearly had a higher budget (apparently £350,000) than some of the other films we've seen recently as well, because it has such luxuries as both interior and exterior shots, and scenes shot in both the USA and UK. This location shooting isn't necessarily a good thing, however, because the UK scenes feel like nothing more than padding that's not even needed, as the film clocks in at 99 minutes and the UK scenes can't be any more than 10 minutes long in total. They're supposed to be flashbacks for the Geography teacher before he came to the US, but don't add anything to the film's plot whatsoever. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of it is the argument at one point about whether a palaeontologist and a vicar can ever be friends as if science and religion are like oil and water, or it's like in Ghostbusters and you're not allowed to cross the streams.

The Amityville Playhouse returns once again to the idea of Amityville being built on a Native American site - this time around though it's a cave system that's home to demons that require a sacrifice of six people every year, and that the entire town is in on this now (there's no explanation of what the town gets out of this, whether it's some sort of success or prosperity or just not having the demons run rampant through the town). Apparently, there's also a firstborn sacrifice clause that they have to abide by as well, which gets brought up almost as an aside so that the film's final twist can work at the very end of the film. But other than that there's not really any explanation as to why things are happening in this particular theatre, or just how the townspeople knew that exactly five people would be coming to the town that weekend, considering how important the number of sacrificial victims is to the town's resident demons.

The film's cast are... okay. None of them are noticeably bad actors, although none of them are particularly good either. Fawn's boyfriend Kyle is annoying, and sadly he's not the first to go, so we have to put up with his loud and obnoxious attitude and gay jokes for the majority of the film. The rest of them feel pretty interchangeable and you don't particularly care about what happens to them. Mainly they just feel like they might be reading their lines off a cheat board just off-camera. In the end, The Amityville Playhouse is just... bland. The cinematic equivalent of white bread.

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Amityville Death House (2015)

The quality - or lack thereof - of some of these Amityville films is really starting to get to me. There's only so much bad acting, effects and/or production values a person can take before they have to start watching compilations of talk show lie detector and DNA results on YouTube (don't judge me). But I'm soldiering on regardless with today's film, Amityville Death House.

College student Tiffany and her three friends are returning from doing hurricane relief in Florida when they decide to make a stop in Amityville to check on Tiffany's grandmother. When they arrive, however, they find that the old woman isn't in very good shape at all, either physically or mentally, and so they decide to stay to look after her. They've picked a bad time for it though, as the spirit of a witch who was executed by the town 300 years previously has chosen this time to seek her revenge against the descendants of her tormentors. While this is going on, Tiffany finds that her grandmother has an old journal from 300 years ago, that appears to have been written by the witch's family, but what power does this journal hold and will any of them survive the witch's revenge?

Amityville Death House is yet another extremely low-budget horror movie that could have been set anywhere for all the connection it has to the Amityville Mythos. but at least this one is mercifully short, clocking in at only 75 minutes, including credits (and they're seven minutes long, so technically the film is just 68 minutes long). But even at that length, the film feels as though it's much, much longer, and drags on for an age before anything even halfway interesting happens at the film's climax.

The film was directed by Mark Polonia, whose previous works I've not seen but from looking at them on IMDB, if I ever do another Shark Week I'll have some good possibilities for that (Sharkenstein, anyone? Land Sharks?) Fred Olen Ray, who you should remember from Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, was also an executive producer, and so while we can't be sure exactly what the budget was, we can be sure at least that they knew how to make the best of what they had. They managed to find a house with those iconic quarter-circle windows for the film, after all (or at least a mock-up of one), which is more than we can say for the last two films we've watched in this series. They also managed to get Eric Roberts for the role of the Warlock/Dark Lord, although considering he spends the entire movie wearing a full hood with a grill over his face, it could have been PeeWee Herman under there and we'd have been none the wiser as long as they'd dubbed over him.

For the majority of the film, very little happens. We go between Tiffany and her friends in her grandmother's house (and her grandmother doesn't so much look unwell as possibly dead several days) and several unconnected people in the surrounding area who fall prey to the vengeful witch's spirit - all of whom die in that low-budget way of screaming in pain while blood splatters on them from off-screen and a CGI effect attacks them. Then Eric Roberts makes another quip about death and we move on. Then at the film's climax, people get possessed by either the witch or by the people who tortured and killed her, and then one of Tiffany's friends grows spider legs and Tiffany's top falls over to reveal she has six breasts. Yeah, that came out of nowhere. They're supposed to be "witch's teats" because Tiffany is the last descendant of the witch, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to be the one to break it to the filmmakers that a "witch's teat" was usually a mole or beauty mark and not multiple sets of Tatty Bojangles. Still, it's at least something original in a film, so Amityville Death House gets points for that.

There's a lot of people living in this area of upstate New York who have accents that I'd normally associate with The Dukes of Hazzard (and a couple of them are making moonshine too, just to add to that) and I'm a little confused as to why there was an establishing shot of some snowy mountains at the start of the film, but that latter point could be down to my lack of geography knowledge rather than the filmmakers just shooting wherever they could afford. Amityville Death House is still zero-budget and not that brilliant, but the simple fact that it had some redeeming features marks it as better than some of the other films we've seen in this series. Also, it has a kickass grindhouse-style poster.

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The Amityville Asylum (2013)

My brother has told me that he thinks my better reviews are the ones where I, in his words, "really put the boot in" to the film. He will, therefore, be very happy to learn that with today's review of The Amityville Asylum, I'm not so much "putting the boot in" as I am taking it around the back of the barn with a shotgun.

After being reminded, once again, of the 1974 shotgun murders of the DeFeo family in their house in Amityville, we start off in 2013, where Lisa Templeton is beginning her new job as a cleaner at the High Hopes Mental Hospital. The job seems easy enough, but from her first night on the job Lisa starts to see and experience strange and unsettling things, including an unpleasant orderly who likes to abuse his power and a mysterious young girl she sees wandering the halls. And then there's Ward X, where the violent criminally insane patients are held - one of whom seems to know a lot about Lisa that she shouldn't know. As the number of strange incidents continue to grow, Lisa begins to investigate the asylum's history and discovers that the asylum is built on the spot where the house at 112 Oceans Avenue once stood. Why was this particular site chosen to be the site for the asylum, and how does Lisa tie into everything that's going on?

The Amityville Asylum is a British film that's supposed to be taking place in America but was clearly filmed in the UK (Wales, to be exact) with an English cast, some of whom try to speak in American accents in the film with varying degrees of success. It also has a completely artificial connection with the Amityville series, in that you could easily remove all mentions of Amityville and the DeFeos and the film wouldn't have been any different. Much like The Amityville Curse, it feels like the Amityville stuff was added in solely to cash in on the infamous franchise. It's also not very good.

The plot moves along at a glacial pace from start to finish. At one point we get a five-minute scene where Lisa is shown every cleaning utensil and bottle of cleaning fluid that she'll need to use in her job - which perhaps wouldn't have been too bad if any of it had had any bearing on the plot later on. But no, it's nothing more than padding, and possibly not even that, as the plot and dialogue feel slow and amateurish. Characters will randomly spout exposition for no reason other than the writer could come up with no other way to insert backstory or other important information, and sometimes they'll do it twice in case we were asleep the first time it was mentioned (five minutes previously). And the "plot twists" at the end of the movie are so incredibly obvious that you can probably guess what they are just from knowing the basic plot mentioned above.

The film's low budget is painfully obvious, from the complete lack of any outside shots until one at the very end of the film, to the deserted and seriously understaffed "mental hospital" (which looks just like the corridors of an office building) because there was clearly no money for any extras. They didn't have time for more than one take for most of the shots too, apparently, as one character can't even pronounce "Amityville" yet they let her go on saying it wrong without trying for a second take, over and over again. And then there's the backstory of the Native American tribe said to have been slaughtered on the site in the 18th century (100 years later than the story given in every other Amityville movie). We're told that they practised witchcraft and human sacrifice with a focus on the number 6, which sounds suspiciously... Hollywood Satanist even before you see the inverted pentagram carved on Eileen Daly's forehead.

I try in reviews to come up with at least one good thing to say about the film, but today it's hard. Some of the cast at least try, I guess? Not all of them succeed, but at least there's someone making the effort. The entire film, though, is just a mess. If I hadn't seen that the director (and writer, producer and composer) has well over a dozen films listed on IMDB, I'd honestly have thought this was a film student's very first effort at making a film. So I guess we've found a film that makes The Amityville Curse look appealing, and makes me worry about what the next film on this list is going to be like...

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The Amityville Haunting (2011)

Things went quiet again for the Amityville series after the 2005 remake wasn't particularly well received. Then, in 2011 a certain little company called The Asylum, known for their 'mockbusters' and, more recently, the Sharknado movie series, came out with The Amityville Haunting and started the whole low-budget assembly line up again.

After some brief text reminding us of what's previously gone on in 112 Ocean Avenue (just in case you've not been paying attention for the past nine days) and some brief footage of some horny teens breaking into the house and getting themselves killed, we meet the Benson family, who are to be the newest family to move in to the Amityville house and be tormented by the spirits there. Said spirits waste absolutely no time getting started, as the sale isn't even finalised before the real estate agent dies in the driveway, and things don't slow down after that. Youngest daughter Melanie makes friends with John Matthew, the ghost of one of the DeFeo children, ghostly banging, laughter and screams come from the vents and crawlspace of the house, and several incidental characters die at the hands of the ghosts (all conveniently off-screen). This time around we get to watch the action through middle child Tyler's camera and the CCTV installed throughout the house, but just how long will the Benson family survive in the house?

In the past, I've said some less-than-charitable things about films produced by The Asylum, but since discovering their take on The Walking Dead, Z Nation, I've softened towards them somewhat. That doesn't mean that I'm about to shower The Amityville Haunting with praise, however, because it's not deserving of very much of it. It's a zero-budget, found footage knock-off of The Amityville Horror that couldn't even afford a cheap replica or mock-up of the infamous house at 112 Ocean Avenue - we don't once see the outside of the house and/or those iconic quarter-circle windows, which technically means that it's not even an Amityville movie really - just a generic haunted house movie.

As I said in the synopsis above, The Amityville Haunting is a found footage film, with the footage split between Tyler's video camera and the fixed CCTV around the house. The former is, of course, incredibly annoying, with shaky cam and constant static interference and blackouts that are clearly supposed to be caused by ghostly influences, but there are one or two actually creepy moments with it, such as when the static picks up unearthly screams and moans that no-one else hears. The CCTV footage, being from fixed cameras, is better, and it's here that I'll actually give the film some praise because it delivers some moments that are genuinely creepy. One moment, for example, has two people sitting in the front room and talking about some of the events in the house, but while the camera is primarily pointed at them, we can also see a semi-transparent figure just standing in the doorway. In another scene, the family is sitting around the dining table when there is a power cut. When the power comes back on, the ghost of one of the DeFeos is standing against a wall, staring down at the family who can't see him. There are a few moments like this, which go to show that the people making these films for The Asylum have at least some talent in filmmaking and could probably do quite well if given an actual budget and time to make a film.

That's about as far as I can go with the praise, however, because the rest of the film is pretty bad. Just about all of the cast repeatedly blow their lines throughout the film, although that doesn't really matter too much because they also talk over each other non-stop - repeating the same lines over and over at increasing volume levels. They're not particularly good actors either, which just makes it all the more painful to watch. Special mention has to go to the scene where the father of the family, who we've had beaten into us throughout the film is ex-military, has a breakdown and goes full-on Apocalypse Amityville in the study, shouting orders at imaginary troops and crawling on his belly across the room... while his family just watch in awkward silence, almost as if this isn't even the first time this has happened. And then there's the film's ending, where we see autopsy reports for each member of the family (oh, yeah, spoiler: they all die at the end) where "extreme" is spelt "extream" and "cord" is spelt "chord". If not for the sinus pain in my jaw right now, this alone would have set my teeth to grinding so hard you could hear them from space.

The Amityville Haunting is not a good film, although it does have some genuinely unsettling moments. More importantly for us, it seems to have reopened the floodgates for a whole new slew of Amityville films made by anyone with a camera and a vaguely Amityville-related plot...

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The Amityville Horror (2005)

After Amityville Dollhouse fizzled out in 1996, the Amityville series went quiet for several years. But then, in the early years of the 21st century, came Michael Bay, destroyer of childhood memories and nostalgia, who has been spending the last fifteen or so years apparently trying to kickstart the apocalypse via the medium of remakes. And so here we are now with a remake of the original Amityville Horror... although at least this version could benefit from the improved levels of special effects available in 2005 instead of 1979.

November 13, 1974. Ronald DeFeo Jr kills his entire family with a shotgun in their Amityville home, claiming later that 'voices' inside the house told him to do it. One year later, the Lutz family buy and move into the same house. Unfortunately for them, the house is still occupied - by both some of the spirits of the DeFeo family and also by the evil spirits who have been in the house for considerably longer, and they all waste no time in making their presences felt. Daughter Chelsea makes friends with Jodie, the dead girl who lives in her closet, but it's George who quickly becomes the most affected by the house, becoming a bad-tempered, wood-chopping and dog-killing maniac. The house wants to make George Lutz to repeat the DeFeo murders on his own family, but will he give in to it?

So, remake. Since comparisons between this movie and the original are inevitable, let's get them out of the way first. One thing that this remake does is get rid of the whole priest subplot, and believe me - nothing of value was lost. The two scenes involving a priest are still just as effective without us having to follow a completely unrelated plot with them that never connects to the rest of the film. We also see a lot more of the spirits inside the home, rather than just a pair of glowing red eyes outside of a window. Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is the greater focus on George Lutz' psychological breakdown and descent into madness due to the house's machinations. Oh, and he kills the family dog. The real George Lutz was actually in the process of suing the film over details like that when he died in 2006 - but since it is a gratuitous animal death included solely to upset the audience, I agree with his decision to sue.

Dog murder aside, I will say that the focus on George Lutz in this version is a good one, as watching him slowly becoming an abusive madman is genuinely unsettling. I think at least part of its effectiveness is due to Ryan Reynolds' performance as George Lutz. While he's known primarily for his comedy timing and for playing Deadpool now, The Amityville Horror shows that he can play more serious roles as well. Although I suspect that the real George Lutz didn't have quite so well-defined abs...

But... while the original Amityville Horror fell down in many areas, including the area of special effects, what it did do well was portray an oppressive atmosphere in the house. This version might have better effects, but that oppression has been replaced with jump scares and, once again, the feeling that somewhere out there an orchestra was being terribly abused during the making of this movie. A key example of this is Jodie the ghost child. While we never saw her in the original, here she's visible all the time, with her white skin and black thread-like veins and shotgun hole in her forehead, and nearly every time she appears there's a musical sting like everyone dropped their instruments at the same time. She's surprisingly malevolent as well - making the babysitter go crazy and trying to make Chloe Grace Moretz walk off the roof so they can play together "forever and ever". And then there's the evil spirit at the heart of the house, renamed Jeremiah Ketchum, a preacher who tortured Native Americans in the original basement of the house in 1692. The film tries to make a creepy play on his name - "Katch 'em and Kill 'em" - but to me at least it just felt like a rejected catchphrase for a Pokemon Nuzlocke run.

In the end, this Amityville Horror remake might have had better effects and a somewhat tighter plot, but instead of using these advantages it instead fell back on the same old jump scares and cheap plot twists to try to scare its audience. It strips out most of the atmosphere of the original and leaves the film feeling like all the other horror remakes that Michael Bay has been involved in, right down to the sepia tones in the flashbacks, the quick cuts so fast that they could trigger an epileptic fit and even the same fecking fonts in the credits.

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Amityville Dollhouse (1996)

With Amityville Dollhouse we reach the end of the Yard Sale of the Damned portion of the series, presumably because they finally ran out of household items that could plausibly become evil. However, we're still not even halfway through the film series - or at least the list I found on Wikipedia that I'm using as my guide for this review series.

The Martin family - newly-married Bill and Claire, Bill's children Todd and Jessica and Claire's son Jimmy - move into their new home, which Bill built himself. In a shed also on the lot Bill finds a large dollhouse, complete with a set of voodoo dolls in it, that looks just like the old Amityville house we all know and... know. He gives it to Jessica as a birthday present, and we can already see where this is going. The dollhouse is, of course, the equivalent of a voodoo house, and things that happen in the dollhouse also happen in the real house, such as a pet mouse in a bedroom that turns into a giant mouse under Jessica's bed. Meanwhile, Jimmy starts receiving visits from his undead father, who encourages him to kill his step-family while decomposing. Claire starts fantasising about having sex with her step-son Todd and Bill dreams of the house burning down. Thankfully, Bill's sister Marla and her husband Tobias are witches or occultists of some sort, but can they save the family from the evil Amityville spirits in time?

Of all the films I've watched in this series so far, Amityville Dollhouse has by far been the hardest one to track down and watch. I'm quite surprised by this - if anything, I'd have expected something like The Amityville Curse or The Evil Escapes to have been the most obscure and out-of-print/unavailable. Thankfully, I eventually got hold of a copy without needing to spend £20+, which is a good thing as I don't like to spend that amount of money on a film I'll only watch willingly once.

The biggest problem is that, while it has several good ideas, it doesn't really do enough with them - in fact, it has too many good ideas, and so none of them really get enough screen time. The voodoo dollhouse is an original idea, for example, but other than the trick with the mouse, very little else happens with it until the very end when it becomes a Deus ex machina. Jimmy's zombie father gets a little more screen time and he's certainly done better than Evil Lamp Dad from The Evil Escapes, but again it's not enough. Honestly, either of these two ideas could have and probably should have had an entire movie to themselves, but having them share 90 minutes just leaves both of them unfulfilled.

Also, what is this series' fascination with incest? This is the third film out of eight to have it as a plot point, and quite frankly it's getting more than a little creepy. There are plenty of other fetishes and perversions out there, evil Amityville spirits - try branching out a little.

The connection with the original Amityville house is also unclear. Yes, the voodoo dollhouse is based on 112 Ocean Avenue, but there is no explanation as to why it was just sitting in that shed, waiting to be found. How did it get there? Who brought it all the way out to the West Coast (I'm assuming it's the West Coast because the film looks like it's set in a desert-like area) Later on, we're also told that the fireplace in the house was the only thing left after the house that was previously on the lot burned down... but what does that have to do with the Amityville mythos? Is the movie trying to tell us that someone took the fireplace and dollhouse from the original Amityville house in New York, shipped it out to wherever this movie is set, built a house around the fireplace which then burned down, leaving only the fireplace, and then Bill came along and built around it again, no questions asked?

...The worst thing about the above paragraph is that I've apparently put more thought into the continuity than the filmmakers did. Hell, even the poster features the wrong Jessica (and in some versions of it they even managed to forget to replace the Evil Lamp with the Voodoo Dollhouse).

It's really no surprise that the Amityville series became dormant for nearly a decade after this film; not only had they clearly run out of ideas for possessed furniture and housewares (evil fridges, microwaves and washing machines having already been taken by other movies), but interest in both making and watching the films was falling to a new low. And so we all breathed a sigh of relief and forgot about the story of the Amityville house, except maybe when reading books of ghost stories at slumber parties to try to scare each other...

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