The Mysteries Of Sarah

Year: 2018

Director: The Spierig Brothers

Cast: Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Angus Sampson

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The Winchester Mystery House is probably the most interesting, strange landmark in America to date. A seven-story maze of halls with staircases that led to nowhere and doorways that open onto ten foot drops that was under construction 24 hours a day, it's the kind of tourist trap that's both of architectural and paranormal interest. Any way you slice it, it's the perfect place to set a movie, and it's astonishing it has taken the world this long. What's even more astonishing is that the Winchester estate chose to make their big screen debut with this myopic dud.

The presence of Helen Mirren certainly must have helped, but why would SHE choose to be here? This film is just like the house itself, an enigma wrapped in a mystery.

The plot of Winchester is barbarically simple. The lawyers at the Winchester Repeating Arms company are "worried" that the majority shareholder Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren) - who has become a recluse in her ever-expanding sprawl of a mansion, believing herself to be haunted by the spirits of every person ever killed by a Winchester rifle - is too mentally unsound to run the company. They hire hallucinogenic-addicted, grief-riddled psychologist Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to assess her mental state and see if they can have her shares taken away from her.

I daresay it doesn't even count as a spoiler to tell you that she sure as sh*t ain't crazy. The house is riddled with ghosts, who spook Dr. Price to no end in a variety of mostly disconnected little vignettes until the Big Bad ghost reveals itself, whereupon this turns into a Conjuring rip-off starring Helen Mirren as Lin Shaye from Insidious. Bada bing, bada boom.

This is probably the only place in the world where tourism would actually increase after you make a horror movie about it.

I gotta hand it to the screenwriters here, they really did find a way to linguistically capture all the false starts and dead-ends that make up the twisted passageways of the Winchester house. The screenplay sets up so many threads that are either completely forgotten (like the good doctor's addiction to laudanum, which is completely dropped by the halfway point - though I really don't mind because there's nothing I like less than a "what's fantasy and what's reality?" theme in a movie where CGI ghosts are f**king people up) or hastily wrapped up in the turgid, busy finale.

And I shan't spoil things, if you somehow have such poor reading comprehension that you reach the end of this review and still want to check the movie for yourself. But let's just say that the final twenty-five minutes are some of the most exhausting horror movie boilerplate I've ever seen, erratically leaping from using well-worn tropes to paper over gaping plot holes to just pulling contradictory nonsense out of its ass in a weak, aching attempt to keep viewers invested. And the manner in which the Big Bad is vanquished is so laughably dumb, it'll remain in my quiver of awful movie scenes to discuss at parties for years to come.

You know what, I actually kind of like this screenshot. But don't be fooled into thinking it represents anything consistent or valuable about the movie.

The most astounding accomplishment of Winchester is that it achieves something I would have thought objectively impossible: it makes the Winchester Mystery House seem boring and bland. The bizarre geography and haphazard interiors should have provided at least an iota of interest and tension. Paranormal movie thrive on the inexplicable, and this house should have provided plenty of fuel to power a sense of menace, even if the ghosts weren't really providing (which they aren't, as the movie forces them through the hoops of a desperately generic haunting before undermining that with a revelation that just makes everything that came before confusing).

But no, this sprawling pile is rendered flat and lifeless by dull lighting that reduces it to a hazy gray background object, and a jagged editing style that refuses to connect any single room with another and make it all seem like a consistent structure. It's incoherent, but not in a way that highlights the natural incoherence of the structure. It bristles against every scrap of interest at every possible opportunity, plopping every scene into a jumbled pile that doesn't comment on any other in any meaningful way.

Just look at that... curtain? It's so... weird? Maybe?

But what of Helen Mirren, you ask? Well, she's certainly in the movie. And she probably had a lot of fun, but that certainly doesn't show here. It's not that she's not trying, but she's not pushed to do much of anything except sit still and stare gravely. The only way she could have saved the movie is if she milked the role of a reclusive, eccentric widow for all it was worth, making everything as big and purely camp as possible. By actually trying to do something realistic with her role, she recuses herself from that responsibility and tragically fades into the harried hash of a screenplay.

As for everyone else in the film, I could hardly pay them the compliment of saying they're even present. An actor I really like, the Aussie hulk Angus Sampson, has a scene or two and I'm happy to see him, but he might as well be the wallpaper. Scratch that, the wallpaper in the Winchester house would actually be interesting. And the de facto lead Jason Clarke can't justify the litany of Obviously Idiotic Horror Movie Character decisions he must make. 

At the end of the day, Winchester is an insult to the idea of the Mystery House, actively railing against the gargantuan promise and failing to do justice to a real life story that is loads more interesting than the rote, creaking ghost story told here.

TL;DR: Winchester is a major disappointment, wasting the incredible potential of a truly great setting and true story.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1019

Für Elise

Year: 2018

Director: Adam Robitel

Cast: Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

How has it already been seven years since the original Insidious? This franchise is already as venerable as Saw was when it reached its pre-2017 conclusion, and that's a cold hard fact I'm just not ready to face. 

Well, more than half a decade in we've reached if not a final film, at least a turning point in this baby brother franchise to The Conjuring: the film that connects the events of prequel Chapter 3 and the original film, completing the arc of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye's medium character, who went from being the Zelda Rubinstein of the series to helming two horror tentpole features, which is by far the coolest thing about these movies). 

The fact that a 74-year-old character actress is now headlining movies for teens makes me absolutely giddy.

Insidious: The Last Key traces Elise's roots back to her hometown of Five Keys, New Mexico. When a client calls her to investigate a haunting in her own childhood home, she and her sidekicks Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell, who returned to pen the script for the fourth time, beating out Saw, which he bailed on after three entries) encounter the demon Keyface (Javier Botet), who is the key to unlocking the secrets of Elise's past.

It's literally impossible to talk about this movie without accidentally making at least 32 key puns.

I initially approached this movie looking for subtext I could use for my new Dread Central column Brennan Went to Film School (first article out January 16th!), and I had my mind blown just a teensy bit. There is a lot of material surging beneath the surface here. While I chose to focus on the feminist Me Too metaphors for sexual assault and whistleblowing, there's also a lot of material about the cycle of abuse and creating your own family. I'm just getting this out of the way now, because I won't really be mentioning these things in my review, as important as they are. You'll just have to wait for my column, folks. It's a goodun.

But as surreptitiously smart as the film is, there's still something a little unsatisfying about the way the story plays out. The plot introduces a lot of threads that are never returned to (the opening quite obviously sets up that Keyface needs to open five doors for some nefarious purpose - and his fingers even have four out of five keys - but instead of having a Thanos-esque collection of keys provide our ticking clock to some grand evil, only one door is ever opened and that plot goes nowhere), some setups with microscopic payoff (they make such a big deal out of Specs having lights on his glasses, and then he never really uses them), and in general it just reeks of cuts and reshoots.

And the intelligence of the screenplay screeches to a halt every time Bruce Davison is onscreen as Elise's younger brother Christian. He is forced through a meat grinder of maudlin, exhausting family drama tropes that simultaneously accomplish the twin feats of deflating the tension and making him look like an idiot horror movie character.

The reason this has happened is that he went to a haunted house to find a whistle he had no reason to believe was actually there. His Mensa membership card is not in the mail.

Also, the real insidious presence that has always been in this franchise is the comic relief from Specs and Tucker, who can sometimes hit the perfect pitch, but mostly feel a little jammed-in and reek of flop sweat. That stench reaches its peak here, where most of the humor is mined from their creepy obsession with Elise's much-younger nieces, who arrive about halfway through the film and are subject to non-stop leering from that point on. It's creepy and it's icky, and it ever so slightly undermines the rest of the actually smart stuff the script has to say.

But... Taking all that into account, there is some pretty effective atmosphere at work here. The Last Key lacks most of the jack-in-the-box jolts that have defined the franchise (save for one scare gag, which utilizes a hoary old trope and flips it on its head in the best possible way), relying on some slow burn creepy imagery to add fuel to that fire. The key image from the trailers - the demonic finger key going into a girl's neck - is obviously incredible, as is the Keyface demon itself (I maintain that Javier Botet is the Lon Cheney of our time, bringing incredible monsters to life and consistently being the best part in films both terrific and mediocre, including [REC], Mama, It, The Conjuring 2, The Other Side of the Door, The Mummy, Alien: Covenant, Crimson Peak, and even The Revenant).

Plus, you can never go wrong with Lin Shaye. In her long career she's been handed a lot of crap, but the woman who can take a one scene role in Amityville: A New Generation and make it a layered portrayal/highlight of the movie has earned a lead role and she crushes it.

And I won't say much about this, but there is a plot twist that will send chills down your spine, blasting into the safe PG-13 world of The Last Key like a window suddenly opened to the burning sunlight. As a popcorn horror movie, it's weaker than the previous entries, but there's still something there that's more than worth seeing, if you're into this sort of thing. And to the tune of $51 million worldwide, it seems that somebody out there definitely is.

TL;DR: Insidious: The Last Key is a little bit underwhelming, but it's smarter than it has any right to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 977

Reviews In This Series
Insidious (Wan, 2011)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)

We Could Leave This Town And Run Forever

Year: 2005
Director: Andrew Douglas
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jimmy Bennett
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Here we are, folks. The end of the line. Well, actually that’s not accurate. This is my stop. The line continues to stretch on into oblivion, because huckster filmmakers will keep on exploiting the Amityville name until either the art of cinema comes to an end or the heat death of the universe plunges us into eternal darkness, whichever comes first. What we can – for lack of a better word – call the “pure” Amityville franchise ends here, with the high-gloss studio remake of 2005, smack dab in the middle of the tremendous new millennium run of godawful remakes of classic horror titles. Most of these were shepherded into existence by Michael Bay’s production company Platinum Dunes, and oh – would you look at that title card.

Generally speaking, remakes tend to put to rest even the most robust of franchises. We haven’t revisited Crystal Lake or Elm Street since they were interred by their respective Platinum Dunes reboots, and a franchise as rickety as Amityville couldn’t stack up to those giants. So it went the way of Freddy and Jason. Mostly.

You see, unfortunately for the general populace, six years later turbo-indie filmmakers cottoned on to the fact that a town’s name ain’t copyrightable, so slapping the word into the title of their chintzy microbudget ghost project was a ticket to earning a couple extra bucks. Since 2011, one or two faux-Amityville projects have seeped into the market from its darkest, dankest corners every year, with a whopping four dropped onto the world like an anvil in 2016 alone (The Amityville Terror, Amityville: No Escape, Amityville: Vanishing Point, and The Amityville Legacy. I’m exhausted just listing them).

As much of a completist as I am, I don’t consider these universally ignored, artistically anemic works as movies, let alone viable entries into a dotty but venerable franchise. I feel no shame about ignoring them and sparing my already ailing patience. You wouldn’t want to read that much useless bile anyway, and I’ve already wasted my breath on the little-seen back half of this marathon, which nobody needed to be warned away from anyway. So! The buck stops here.

The house screamed “Get Out!” and for once, I’m going to heed that warning.

I daresay we’re pretty familiar with the plot of The Amityville Horror at this point. In the mid-70’s,, newlywed couple Kathy (Melissa George) and George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) find a home with a price they can’t refuse in Amityville, Long Island. They move in with Kathy’s three children (the most important being played by Chloë Grace Moretz in her film debut) and naught but 28 days later are driven out by the same demonic forces that caused a boy to murder his family with a  shotgun just a year earlier, who this time have their sights set on corrupting George.

The same general plot beats and scare gags play out, with a few notable exceptions:

1. The addition of a rooftop setpiece they loved so damn much they used it twice
2. Liberal application of a shirtless, wet-whenever-possible Ryan Reynolds
3. Not only is the ghost Jodie not a sinister invisible presence, she might as well get third billing
4. It’s hella dumb.

Platinum Dunes strikes again.

To be honest, I was convinced that a remake with a shirtless Ryan Reynolds could only have been an improvement on the original Amityville Horror. I found that film incredibly tedious and lackluster, and the run time of the new version was already a massive improvement. The propaganda artists who wrote the back of the box would have you believe that the film is 90 minutes long, but it clocks out at a fleet hour and twenty, lopping a good 40 minutes off the 1979 entry.

While that was always and continues to be the right decision, every other choice the filmmakers made seems to have been the wrong one. I’m completely used to and even enjoy some sequels and remakes where the ethos is “the same thing, only worse,” but when the original thing was already pretty bad, this all just becomes incredibly punishing.

Amityville ’05 is mirthlessly stupid, top to bottom. It has one of my favorite hallmarks of dumb movies (Melissa George reads aloud the headlines on the microfiche she’s investigating, in case you weren’t paying attention) but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, baby! This is a film where shining a flashlight into someone’s face knocks them over like a bowling pin, and where their solution to the haunted house problem is to take a boat and sail to the middle of a lake (in full view of the house, mind you), as if they saw the end of Friday the 13th and were impressed by Alice’s genius decision-making.

Literally, they just sit on a boat and wait to see if Ryan Reynolds decides to kill them or not. This is beyond stupid Horror Movie Decision-Making, it borders on literal child abuse.

It’s hard to pinpoint the primary problem with the movie, because there’s just so damn many of them. The one that bothered me the most though was how brutally unsubtle the whole thing is. I already touched on how Jodie has been converted from an offscreen menacing presence to a bloated CGI-laden spook who pops in every ten minutes or so for some of the goofiest fright gags you ever did see, but another scene that really ruffles my feathers is the following:

Ryan Reynolds is outside, chopping wood and being sexy. Melissa George runs out, frantically asking where their daughter is! It has been in no way established that he was supposed to be watching her. For all we knew, she’s been chilling in the house this whole time. But now, we’re suddenly supposed to care about this dunderheaded scene that leads to a frightfully silly non-scare that assumes that because Chloë Grace is standing on a boat, she must be in danger(?). None of it makes any sense, but it’s so brutally injected into the screenplay that it isn’t even supported by any sort of context. It just is, and what it is is moronic.

I will admit that there’s one incredibly effective jump scare buried in the mire here, so the movie has that going for it. But the rest of the scares are so effortful that they misjudge their impact and clang uselessly against the screen. The camera goes wild, swopping and whirling in an unnecessarily complicated display that hopes to distract us from the fact that refrigerator magnets moving around isn’t a super scary thing.

The one thing that could have salvaged any sort of atmosphere was the lead performances. Ryan Reynolds is a performer I generally like, and Melissa George is… Melissa George. But they both fumble the ball here. Reynolds especially lets his beard do most of the acting for him. He’s charming in the first act as a handsome, hopeful newlywed, but his descent into madness is accompanied by some of the worst horror movie screaming I’ve ever seen. He yips like a dog, adding extra aftershock screams after long pauses, each yelp a painful stab into your brain.

Amityville ’05 is just exhausting. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it has the wisdom to use Reynolds’ shirtless body as a crutch during some of the shakier scenes, but other than maybe The Amityville Curse, this is the biggest waste of time in the entire franchise, and that is not something I expected to be saying when the marathon finally swung back around to a movie with an actual budget.

TL;DR: The Amityville Horror is a horror film by blunt force trauma, a brutally unsubtle exercise in pointless remaking.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1303
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

We'll be Together For One More Night

Year: 1996

Director: Steve White

Cast: Robin Thomas, Starr Andreeff, Allen Cutler 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

We’re almost there! The end is in sight! Before the remake swept the franchise back into theaters for a brief cultural resurgence, the Amityville franchise was quietly drowning in the muck of the direct-to-video swamp of the 90’s. The last bubble of air the series let out before sinking to a watery grave was the 1996 project Amityville Dollhouse. That’s right, the last feeble attempt to remind the world that this once respected haunted house staple used to thrum with life and vitality was called Amityville Freaking Dollhouse.

I’d lament how the mighty had fallen, but I didn’t even like the original all that much.

So… Guess what this movie’s about. Actually, you know what? That joke isn’t fair. It might seem obvious, but not one foot trod fiery ground in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (not to mention that it certainly was not the last one) and there was no cackling broomstick jockey in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, so it’s not wise to make assumptions. But yes, the eighth film in the Amityville franchise is about a haunted dollhouse, shaped exactly like the abode that haunted a million late-70’s nightmares.

Frankly, if this was the only way we could return the excellent spooky design of the original house to the fold, so be it. I’ll sacrifice logic for one last prolonged look at the best piece of imagery any of these infinite, mostly dreadful films had to offer. Logic be damned!

So this dollhouse is located in a locked shed on the grounds of a home that was burned down, leaving only the chimney standing. A new house has finally been built on the property (the film seems to strongly imply that this is the very same Long Island lot that has visited so much grief on so many terrible families, even though it was so clearly shot in Southern California that you can practically smell the In N Out) by one Bill Martin (Robin Thomas, who most recently played a main character’s father on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). He’s attempting to Brady Bunch his family with his new wife Claire (the brilliantly named Starr Andreef, who had a brief horror career starting with 1983’s D&D slasher Skullduggery), but her obnoxiously nerdy son Jimmy (Jarrett Lennon) is having a tough time fitting in.

Bill’s young daughter and Carol Ann stand-in Jessica (Rachel Duncan) gets along with him fine, but his teen jock son Todd (Allen Cutler) doesn’t know a life outside of pummeling dweebs. Actually, come to think of it, nobody knows a life outside of this house. Neither Claire nor Bill seem to have jobs to go to, and the kids clearly don’t have school because they’re home at all hours of the day. Maybe they’ve slipped into some sort of pocket dimension created by the evil dollhouse.

Anyway, Jessica receives the titular dollhouse as a last-minute birthday present, and it quickly becomes clear that it exerts a wicked influence and whatever happens to the miniature happens to the real house, centralized around that original fireplace. So, spooky-ish things happen for an hour and change, almost nothing that gets set up is ever paid off, Claire develops a hankering for Todd’s young flesh because at least one out of every three of these films has to have a creepy Lannister vibe, and the dollhouse eventually manifests as the slowly moldering corpse of Jimmy’s dad (Clayton Murray) á là An American Werewolf in London.

Like, I’m pretty sure Griffin Dunne could sue.

Even for a film called Amityville Dollhouse, this one is kind of a mess. The plot, as basic as it is (it’s about creating family relationships – mostly between Jimmy and Todd and Jimmy and Bill) spins in circles for so long it vomits all over itself, then barely recovers in time to slap in a resolution via voiceover seconds before the credits roll. In its dizzying rampage, half a dozen subplots fall to the ground, shattering horribly (most notably an absentee mother who is mentioned twice and never brought up again). And while the dollhouse is never adequately explained and no would one wish it to be (how could that explanation not have been incalculably stupid?), it doesn’t even follow the rules it sets up for itself, and even more egregiously fails to explore its own potential.

In a key scene, a pet mouse crawling into the dollhouse manifests as a giant rodent rattling Jessica’s bed with its sheer bulk. It’s cheesy and cribs more than a little bit from The Exorcist, but that genuinely interesting concept is tossed aside in favor of scenes like the random family members who are also convenient witches performing the most clichéd séance in the history of cinema.

Although I shouldn’t have expected more of a film so unsubtle that the way it develops Jimmy the Science Whiz’s character is to have him drop some unspecified chemicals on ghost goop, watch it fizzle, and mutter “fascinating.” This never comes up again.

Science, y’all!

Amityville Dollhouse is about as nuanced as a kick to the crotch, but it has one or two good things going for it:

Thing #1: Todd is actually pretty hot, and he gets way more sex scenes than a domestic family drama really ought to have. Also there’s some naked breasts lying around, if you’re into that.

 Lord knows, we all need something to get us by in these trying times. 

Thing #2: The inconsistency of the plot provides a sense that just about anything can happen, and it very frequently does. Unshackled from any sense of logic or narrative decorum, the dollhouse’s manifestations are birthed from a feverish pit of haunted house tropes and creative decay. Rubbery Troll 2 monsters rub elbows with giant dead wasps in voodoo dolls and piñata tarantulas in this movie’s desperate quest to reach the finish line. 

It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but at least it’s presented in a pattern so inscrutable that it almost feels fresh.

Amityville Dollhouse numbers among the worst entries in the franchise, but at the very least it’s squarely the best of the worst. And frankly I’m shocked we’ve gotten this far without some truly egregious acting (Dollhouse fares the worst, with a  moment where Jessica utters a disappointed “oh…” in what is supposed to be sheer terror - but even this entry had inoffensive performances all around), so that’s at least something to be thankful for. But seriously, who needed the Amityville franchise to get this far? The movie was bearable, but there’s no reason for anyone to watch it ever again, even for ironic camp value.

TL;DR: Amityville Dollhouse is a dumb, derivative movie, but at least it's just weird enough to carry itself across the finish line.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1150
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

If I Could Find You Now, Things Would Get Better

Year: 1993

Director: John Murlowski

Cast: Ross Partridge, Julia Nickson, Lala Sloatman 

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This deep into the series, two films from the end, it’s almost disappointing when a movie turns out to be decent. That would mean that this whole slog has been worthwhile, and I don’t know if I’m mentally sound enough to want to admit that. But alas, such is the case with 1993’s Amityville: A New Generation, hot on the heels of the also pretty OK Amityville 1992: It’s About Time.

To account for its success, I could point to the source material. A New Generation pulls yet another haunted object from the dusty, heavily fictionalized tome that was Amityville: The Evil Escapes (which provided the haunted clock to It’s About Time and the haunted floor lamp to Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes). It’s true that I’ve enjoyed all of these charmingly dumb films more than their miserable peers, but I’m loathe to give credit to such a lazy, exploitative piece of work.

Besides, all signs point to the influence of a titanic figure of retro horror who never gets the credit she deserves: casting director Annette Benson. An unsung heroine of the 1980’s, Benson is responsible for the casts of movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Night of the Comet, and Christine. She’s second only to Fern Champion in her run of hits, and yes of course I know about 80’s slasher casting directors, are you surprised? Now, I’m not saying she’s the only person responsible here, but there is a noticeable step up between this film and the previous one. The most recognizable cast member since Amityville sank into the direct-to-video swamp has been freaking Kim Coates, so it’s astonishing that she gathered even the small coterie of semi-recognizable faces she did here, seven films in. And that has made all – or at least a healthy portion of – the difference.

All hail Annette Benson!

The haunted object coming down the pike this time is an ornate mirror, gifted by a mysterious hobo named Bronner (Jack Orend) to Keyes Terry (Ross Partridge, most recently spotted in Stranger Things as the Byers patriarch), a bohemian photographer with tragically 90’s sexyhair and a penchant for layering oversized button-downs. He lives in an impossibly enormous loft with his gainfully employed girlfriend Llanie (Lala Sloatman) and his painter roommate Suki (Julia Nickson), who falls in love with the antique and proudly displays it in her room.

Unfortunately, the mirror (which hung in the original Amityville house or whatever, OOOooooOOO) acts as a portal for vicious demonic forces, who introduce a chain of death and destruction into the lives of Keyes, Suki, Llanie, their landlord Dick (David Naughton of An American Werewolf in London), their sculptor friend Pauli (Richard Roundtree, AKA Shaft!), and local investigator Detective Clark (Terry O’Quinn of Lost and The Stepfather). The film also finds room for horror genre stalwart Lin Shaye, who always spices up whatever project she’s given. Score another point for Benson.

Swish! Nothing but Annette!

I really really liked Candyman 3: Day of the Dead. No, I didn’t lose my train of thought. I just want to remind you that I may be a crazy person before I tell you that Amityville: A New Generation is my second favorite movie in the franchise so far. Maybe I just have a weakness for 90’s DTV quickies with their weird high concepts and leftover 80’s cult actors, but there really is something here that wasn’t there before.

Aside from the unusually competent cast (I won’t say “overqualified,” because who really is shocked to see any of these names appear in a forgotten horror title?), A New Generation has a reasonably solid, coherent plot (Keyes finds that this mirror is a link to his buried past) that strings together a healthy set of pretty excellent scare gags, at least on the sliding scale of a beaten-down reviewer this far into a franchise marathon.

No Amityville film since the original trilogy has produced a sequence as compelling and visually bizarre as the moment where Suki’s mirror-inspired paintings of demons (attached to the wall via a series of swinging nooses) dance up and down, tear themselves apart, and launch her into an expressionistic tunnel of their own tattered remains. And that’s far from the only interesting idea at play here. I wouldn’t necessarily call anything in the film ‘scary,” but it’s definitely the product of someone exercising their creativity and not just submitting to the doldrums of the cookie cutter sequel format.

In short, it’s the Citizen Kane of Amityville movies.

Let me give you some insight into the process of how this movie got on my good side. Take the sexy/terrible hair and hilarious 90’s fashions of the cast of Friends, toss them with the pretentious aspirations and bohemian self-indulgence of the Rent crew, then drizzle on a heaping helping of paranormal antique mayhem, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a fun-ass movie. Sure, it’s an off-brand version of all the things it reminds me of, but throw in some dimestore Suspiria music and Lin Shaye and we’re off to the races! So what if I’m an easy lay? I just want to have a good time.

Plus, A New Generation is pretty much the only Amityville film since the original trilogy to evoke the evil eye windows of the house in any meaningful way. In the decade since that glorious set was left behind, many films have tried to create their own interpretation of that iconic look (Amityville 1992: It’s About Time had a tract home that looked more like a squinting Milhouse than a glaring, angry façade), but this film harnesses its quasi-Elm Street nightmare sensibility to turn a pair of emergency doors into a striking, evocative silhouette. Also, you gotta love the world’s worst cop Terry O’Quinn, who waves off the violent ravings of a madman in favor of a juicy quip.

Do I recommend that you rush out and immediately rent Amityville: A New Generation from your local Blockbuster? Hell no! But this late in the season, it has been a real oasis of quality for me, and I feel newly refreshed in my approach toward Amityville Dollhouse and the looming finale to this godforsaken series.

TL;DR: Amityville: A New Generation is a surprisingly delightful entry in the 90's DTV canon.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 903
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

There’s A Piece Of You That’s Here With Me

Year: 1992

Director: Tony Randel

Cast: Stephen Macht, Shawn Weatherly, Megan Ward

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I know we’ve had some rough times during this Amityville marathon, but overall I’ve been enjoying this second trilogy far more than the first, even if the production quality has taken a sharp nosedive. Part 5 was a bust, but it’s sandwiched between two films based on the loony short story collection Amityville: The Evil Escapes, about haunted objects from the Amityville home being bought by various unsuspecting antique enthusiasts.

I didn’t think anything could beat the haunted lamp of Part 4 in terms of sheer kooky inanity, but here comes Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, which throws a haunted clock into the mix. In addition to providing that delightfully idiotic title, the clock concept opens up a lot of avenues for crackerjack direct-to-video nonsense and I’m all in.

Once franchises are desperate enough for pun tiles, anything goes.

So, a clock. It’s not such a triumph of Evil Object design as the gnarled floor lamp two movies ago (god, this franchise just refuses to end), but it’s certainly spiny and baroque enough that no reasonable human being should want it in the house. Luckily, real estate developer Jacob Sterling (Stephen Macht) is not a reasonable human being. After he gets mauled by a dog that may or may not be a ghost, his hopelessly attached ex Andrea (Shawn Weatherly of Baywatch) stays in his Poltergeist-style tract home to take care of him and his two kids: be-earringed punk freshman Rusty (Damon Martin) and virginal teen daughter Lisa (Megan Ward of Joe’s Apartment fame).

The clock begins to exude its influence on the house, turning Jacob into a rabid Close Encounters-esque recluse, obsessed with sketching and sculpting images of the original Amityville house (the still-impressive design of which makes a glorious reappearance after being absent for the blasted entirety of The Amityville Curse). As his madness grows, time starts to fluctuate around the family, slowing, stopping, flipping, and reversing as they’re all haunted by images of black goo and various mildly spooky occurrences.

It’s so hard to summarize movies that are just random grab bags of scare scenes.

I’m going to actually say some nice things about It’s About Time, so I want to preface that by reminding you that it’s not a good movie. This is still a direct-to-video Amityville sequel, with a perilously low budget and actors who are basically competent but wholly unremarkable. The sets and props also have that curiously blocky look that haunts cheap productions, as if everything was roughly carved from Styrofoam seconds before being put onscreen. This is not top-tier filmmaking by any stretch of the imagination, but at least the project was put in the hands of a director with an imagination to stretch.

Tony Randel is by no means a master craftsman, but the man who cut his teeth on Hellbound: Hellraiser II has more to offer than the typical DTV Amityville director (the most they could collectively boast was a handful of episodes of Touched by an Angel). And while it’s clear that a bigger budget certainly would have allowed some of the core ideas to flourish more than they actually did in practice, there’s creativity and a sense of fun at work here, especially in the terrifically strange third act.

Plus, I have a soft spot for films that show handsome, bearded men in peril.

Actually, you know what, allow me to introduce you to the aforementioned handsome, bearded man. That’s Lenny, the second useless psychiatrist character in as many movies. He also happens to be Andrea’s boyfriend, who’s surprisingly chill with her living with her ex. So chill in fact that he’s willing to have a picnic on these strangers’ patio, bone down on Andrea mere feet away from the bedrooms of both her convalescing former lover and his underaged children, and somehow be willing to sit down and take a bath in this house after that very same former lover has threatened him with a loaded revolver. Lenny is awash in a sea of completely inscrutable character motivations, and I gotta say I love his moxie.

And who even takes baths anymore? So brave…

Bad-good characters aside, It’s About Time embraces the “rubber reality” of post-Elm Street horror with gusto, plunging everyone into bizarre situations that are occasionally quite visually distinctive and always totally bugnuts.

Some gags are legitimately chilling, like an invisible visitor who joins Andrea in her bed. Some are even a little gory, like the elderly neighbor who gets Final Destinationed by an ice cream truck. And some are just bizarre, like the Under the Skin-esque seduction murder that involves a model train. The final 35 minutes or so just pile on the wet and wild cheapie horror stunts, and it’s more than enough to keep you entertained, if you’ve already been inoculated against lousy DTV filmmaking.

Amityville 1992: It’s About Time actually provides an experience and avoids being a slog even during the not particularly interesting character moments. It doesn’t quite cross that dotted line over into “good movie” territory, but I enjoyed myself quite a bit with this one. It delivered a heaping helping of earnest weirdness, which is exactly what I require from a horror flick of its ilk.

TL;DR: Amityville 1992: It's About Time is a reliably bonkers DTV sequel.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 903

Reviews In This Series

The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)

Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)

Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)

Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)

The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)

Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)

Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)

Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)

The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)

Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

When I Sleep, I Dream And It Gets Me By

Year: 1990

Director: Tom Berry

Cast: Kim Coates, Dawna Wightman, Helen Hughes

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

And… here’s where this marathon is going to get tough, as if it wasn’t a hard pill to swallow from square one. After fending off the direct-to-video doldrums for four entries and eleven years, the swiftly declining haunted house series succumbed to the pull of its mediocre horror destiny with its fifth entry, The Amityville Curse.

At this point, I can’t help but worry that my reviews will begin to deteriorate, as there are only so many variations on “boring and poorly made motion picture goes through the motions of a haunted house thriller” that I can pull out of my brain. But let’s see if I can squeeze a few more drops out of this godforsaken franchise, shall we?

Lord knows Hollywood seems to be able to.

Well, at least there’s some semblance of a plot. Let’s talk about it. Twelve years after a priest (Jan Rubes) is shot to death in a confessional, his dilapidated house is bought by newlywed couple; Marvin (David Syerin) and Debbie (Dawna Wightman). It’s a surprise they’ve managed to stay together even this long, because they quite transparently loathe each other. Debbie is a psychic who has been receiving visions in her dreams of evil forces lurking in the house, and Marvin is a psychologist skeptic who scoffs at everything she believes in and stands for.

The couple is joined for the week by three friends who for some reason have agreed to drop everything and help them remodel the house. They promptly set into acting like a bunch of randy teens because this is a horror movie, even if they’re patently too old to be behaving this way. These bizarre houseguests include horny sex couple Abigail (Cassandra Gava) and Frank (Kim Coates of Sons of Anarchy in an early role), and Bill (Anthony Dean Rubes), about whom we know nothing other than he has a penchant for wearing stripes. Bill is by far the most mysterious thing in the movie, much more so than the shadowy presence who is bumping off the people in the house, starting with the one-eyed neighbor Mrs. Moriarty (Helen Hughes).

Also, spooky paranormal things happen, but they really take a back seat to scenes of remodeling and half-baked drama about Abigail’s fidelity.

Though that drama is so blink-and-you’ll-miss-it that you’d need a Clockwork Orange machine for it to even register.

As you may have noticed, this is the movie where the franchise really starts to lose the plot. Even the “haunted floor lamp in California” entry has stronger ties to the events of The Amityville Horror than Curse, which contents itself to merely present a paranormal story that takes place in the same town. As if Amityville, Long Island was built over a Hellmouth or something. As much as it behooves the franchise to break from the limiting confines of the “true” Amityville story, you just can’t expect to succeed when you oust the franchise’s most consistent and compelling character: the house, with its iconic arched, angry windows.

That house and its excellent expressionistic design went a long way toward delivering the chills even in the chintziest, most boring sequences the franchise had to offer. And The Amityville Curse is nothing if not chintzy and boring. The anonymous, squat pile of bricks at the center of Curse sucks out every last molecule of atmosphere, revealing the disappointingly bare foundation that all of these films have been built on.

The Amityville Curse revels in its own tedium, unspooling scene after scene of character interactions that have just enough flavor for you to despise every one of the players involved, but yet not enough to actually pique even the slightest amount of interest in their dealings. The plot seems to center around the vague shape of a mystery, but it’s so ineptly handled that the Huge Twist is something I just took for granted like 20 minutes in. There’s nothing to latch onto for at least an hour, other than a handful of lines written with an iota of pith and one or two shock gags that you can find scary if you really focus.

Forgive me for trying to feel something while sitting through this movie.

The only truly interesting thing about The Amityville Curse is that, by the end of the third act, it completely forgets that it’s a ghost movie. You see, the mysterious figure who has been murdering the hell out of folks turns out to be an actual flesh and blood human being, and just like that we have a slasher film on our hands. The Amityville Curse is so much of a slasher, in fact, that had this been released a year earlier, I would have had to strongly consider including it in Census Bloodbath.

And wouldn’t you know it, Debbie is actually a pretty capable Final Girl. Drawing inspiration from other hardcore heroines in terrible movies like The Demon or Lady Stay Dead, she gets creative when she’s in survival mode, using saw blades as Frisbees and even giving us a passable gore gag when crushing the killer’s fingers in a door.

Of course, this trick didn’t make me like The Demon or Lady Stay Dead any more, so it certainly doesn’t do the trick with The Amityville Curse. Ten relatively thrilling minutes don’t make up for all that wasted time sitting through this movie when I could have been doing something more interesting and rewarding, like watching a leaky roof drip water into a bucket, or pricking my own finger with a thumbtack.

TL;DR: The Amityville Curse make a surprising turn into decent slasher territory, but it's too little too late.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 963

Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

It's Everywhere I Go, It's Everything I See

Year: 1989

Director: Sandor Stern

Cast: Patty Duke, Jane Wyatt, Fredric Lehne 

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I’m writing some of these reviews ahead of time because there are so damn many to get through, and cramming all these viewings into the span of one month would strain my hair-pulling muscles. If you’ll permit a peek behind the curtain, I’d like to tell you that it’s been a full month and a half since I’ve sat through an Amityville film. As much as I enjoyed Amityville 3-D, it took that long for my spirit to recover from the lashing that the original Amityville trilogy inflicted upon it.

It was with great trepidation that I stuck my toe back into the water of this franchise, but I’m pleased to report that – for the time being, anyway – Amityville has seemed to settle at the blissfully dumb register of mid-range horror sequels, which is really all I ask. After 3-D’s dismal box office got the franchise booted out of theaters and set on hiatus for six long years, the TV movie gods saw fit to resurrect it in the shape of a Patty Duke vehicle dubbed Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes. And this is not a drill, it’s about a haunted lamp.

I live for these moments.

Amityville 4 opens the way every haunted house sequel should: six priests descend upon that dastardly Long Island home with the glaring eyes it pretends are windows, and they exorcise the f**k out of it. They appear to be successful, minus the fact that the studly, cleft-chinned Father Kibbler (Fredric Lehne, who has had a thriving career appearing in one to three episodes of every show you’ve ever watched on a hotel TV set while waiting for your turn to take a shower) was sent to the hospital after a nasty encounter with a possessed floor lamp that looks like it sprouted straight out of the opening credits of Hannibal.

Wouldn’t you know it, but a hapless antique shopper (Days of Our Lives stalwart Peggy McCay) with a pronounced sense of irony picks up the very same lamp at a yard sale and ships it off to her sister Alice (Jane Wyatt) for her birthday, but not before cutting herself on a jagged edge and dying of a mysterious infection. As luck would have it, the lamp arrives at Alice’s seaside California abode on the very same day as her mostly estranged daughter Nancy (Patty Duke), who was recently made a widow by a husband her mother never approved of. In tow are her three kids: teen daughter Amanda (Zoe Trilling, for whom this would not be the last horror sequel – her credits include Night of the Demons 2 and Leprechaun 3), pre-adolescent son Brian (Aron Eisenberg of Star Trek: Deep Space 9) and blonde moppet Jessica (Brandy Gold), who almost immediately begins talking to the lamp as if its her dead father.

As tensions rise between mother and daughter, the haunted lamp uses its power over household appliances to terrorize the family as it attempts to possess Jessica, for reasons of… I don’t know, evil or something.

Look, the fact that there’s even a plot at all is remarkable. Let’s not push it.

Sandor Stern, the auteur who wrote and directed Amityville 4, has a prior link to the franchise, having penned the screenplay for the original film. One would think this would be a detraction, given how messy and overlong that movie is, but honestly it’s a recipe for bad movie magic. With the street cred of having created the massively successful The Amityville Horror, its seems like he was given carte blanche to duck down whatever narrative rabbit holes he wished, and he did so with ravenous gusto.

Amityville 4 is bananas. It doesn’t have the budget to give us the truly ridiculous rubber creature antics of The Possession or 3-D, but the crackerjack “haunted lamp” idea is just the tip of the iceberg. We get people strangled with lamp cords, severed garbage disposal hands attacking plumbers, and what can only be described as a basement chainsaw battle between a young boy and an elderly maid. The script drops the ball on some of its most interesting ideas (the chainsaw sequence could have led to some good intrigue that sputters and stalls almost instantly, and the “Golden Girls vs. haunted lamp” movie the opening scene promises would almost certainly have been better than what we get), but the random fragments it has are still totally nuts.

Also, apropos of nothing, there’s a scene shot at the same high school as A Nightmare on Elm Street, so that’s rad.

But as much as Amityville 4 fails to cash in on some of the more interesting plot threads, the story at the core is completely solid. It’s all blandly functional boilerplate, there’s no two ways about it, but it’s a decently acted, reasonably engaging way to pass the time between fun fair fright gags. It might help a teensy bit that all the male side characters are extremely easy on the eyes, but in these marathons I must use every foothold I can get.

I’m not here to pretend that this movie is a great piece of filmmaking or a compelling diamond in the rough. But it’s affably dumb, and what more could you want from the fourth entry in a franchise that was already rotten from the beginning? The filmmaking doesn’t come anywhere close to the heights of The Amityville Horror, but The Evil Escapes has an eminently watchable quality that the original lacks. 

It might not boast the subtly chilling horror of muzzle flashes as viewed through the windows of a house in a nerve-shattering static shot, but it has a moment where an elderly woman suddenly develops super-strength and throws a floor lamp through an attic window onto a rocky beach, whereupon it explodes like it has been soaked in kerosene. That’s good enough for me.

P.S.: I didn’t have anywhere to put this in the article, but I had to mention the fact that there’s a sequence that opens with the teen daughter dumping two entire huge bowls of salad into a garbage disposal, and if that’s not the most beautifully insane way to motivate a scene, I don’t know what is.

TL;DR: Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes is dumb as rocks, but there's something inherently watchable about it.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1077
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)