In my previous Amityville post, I went over the first three movies in the long-running franchise. The Amityville Horror kicked things off by retelling the story that made the house as famous as it was. The Lutz family moved into 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville. They lasted less than a month before moving out, claiming that there was some sort of evil haunting the house. They left all their possessions behind. Amityville II: The Possession told the story of a mass murder committed in the same 112 Ocean Avenue house, and the demonic forces that may have pushed a son into killing his entire family. Amityville 3-D followed up both those stories by sharing the tale of a skeptic who studied the house to see if the evil was truly present.
Those were the first three movies of the Amityville franchise. They were each theatrically released. Things changed quickly after that. The poor showing of Amityville 3-D made another theatrical entry unjustifiable. It barely made money. Factoring in marketing, it probably lost money. Anyone who wanted to continue the Amityville saga would need to find another way to put the movies out. That’s where the two movies of this post come in.
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes saw the franchise move into the television realm. The Amityville Curse brought the movies into the world of direct-to-video, where they would remain until the 2005 remake of the original. There were also a bunch of direct-to-video movies following the remake. I’ll get to those in a later post. For now, I should focus on what’s directly in front of me. It’s these two middle entries in the original run of Amityville movies. The first one up is…
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes
A lamp. The movie was about a family fighting with a lamp. I don’t even know what to write because I’m just plain baffled that it was about a lamp. I’ll try, or else this section will feel like it’s missing something, but I’m hung up on the lamp being the villain. A lamp. Not even a normal lamp. Some weird looking lamp that if you thought “What would an evil lamp look like?” would be this lamp. It didn’t look like something that people would have in their home at all. Well, unless those people were fans of Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes.
This was the first non-theatrical outing for the Amityville franchise. It was a television movie that aired on NBC in 1989. The format change was apparent from the beginning. The framing of each shot felt much more like it was designed for the “full screen” television aspect ratio than the wider theatrical ratio. It meant that the blocking was completely different. People were centred in the frame more often than not, making it feel less like a movie and more like an extended episode of an 80s anthology show. Not that I’ve seen too many 80s anthology shows.That anthology element was present through the story, as well. Nancy Evans (Patty Duke) was forced to move her family in with her mother, Alice Leacock (Jane Wyatt) in California. Strange things began happening in the house. They quickly found out the source of these strange, increasingly evil, happenings was a lamp that Alice had been sent from the Amityville house. The lamp was tormenting Nancy’s children Amanda (Zoe Trilling) and Brian (Aron Eisenberg), and making her other daughter Jessica (Brandy Gold) believe that her dead father was living through it.
There were a few things in Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes that harkened back to the three theatrical Amityville movies. One was the inclusion of priests into the story. The Amityville Horror and Amityville II: The Possession were movies about the supernatural forces within the Amityville house. At the same time, they featured priests in major roles, with their own subplots. By the end of Amityville II: The Possession, the movie had become the priest’s story. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes picked up the priest stuff once again, beginning with the opening scene. A group of priests entered the Amityville house after the events of the first, and possibly second, movie. Who knows what the continuity of this franchise is? Is there any continuity? Anyway, they were performing an exorcism on the house, which led to Father Kibbler (Fredric Lehne) witnessing a demonic force entering a lamp. He would worry about that lamp and where it went until the end of the movie, when he confronted the demonic lamp once and for all.
The biggest change, however, was the setting. The opening scene was set within the Amityville house, which for sure meant it didn’t take place after Amityville 3-D. The house got destroyed at the end of that one. Following the opening scene, there was a yard sale where the lamp was sold. The rest of the movie took place across the country in California, where the lamp was sent. It was about a family living in another house dealing with the same sort of supernatural stuff because the demonic force had travelled in the lamp. It was the same demonic force since it pulled the classic closing the window on someone trick again. The Amityville Horror had a window slam on a child’s hand, drawing blood. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes had a window bonk a teenager in the head, knocking her unconscious for a few minutes. There was no doubt about it being the same demonic force.
The final thing worth noting about Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes is the ending. Each of the movies had a sort of finality to the ending. They tied things up in a way that, sure, there could be a continuation, but if there wasn’t, it was a closed story. The Amityville Horror ended with the family leaving the house. Amityville II: The Possession ended with the priest character taking on the demonic force that Sonny Montelli had been possessed by, as a sort of penance for his own sins. The third movie ended with the house being blown up. There were ways to continue the story, sure. None of them were as direct as Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes. The lamp was destroyed. In the final seconds, however, it was shown that the demonic force had transferred from the lamp to the family cat. The family hadn’t escaped the demon like they thought. It was a more direct hint at a sequel than any of the previous films. It was setting up for the demonic force to continue terrorizing the same family. That didn’t pan out as the franchise moved forward, though.
I’m glad it didn’t pan out. As you’ll see in later posts, I had major issues with the lamp as the villain of Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes. It was a personification of the evil from the previous three movies, only instead of being a person, it was a lamp. That didn’t add anything to the way the evil worked. It did the same exact sort of evil stuff it did in the other movies, only now it was a lamp. And it was an ugly lamp that nobody would put in their house unless they were excited to have a prop from a movie. The idea of the evil being contained in an object was a common theme throughout the Amityville franchise. The other instances, however, tried something new when the evil was in an object. The object was important because the evil was influenced by the object. An evil clock that could mess with time. An evil dollhouse that could play around with people’s perception of space. That sort of stuff. The lamp was just an evil lamp, and that didn’t really change how the evil worked. It was a change made simply so that people had an object to focus their fear on, and that’s where my problem was. That, and the look o the lamp. Anyway…
The Amityville Curse
For the fifth Amityville movie, the franchise took a pure anthology approach. The end of the fourth film would have made any audience think that a fifth film would be the family going up against a possessed cat, trying to get rid of the demonic presence while trying not to kill the cat. Because it’s their family cat, you know? That’s not what The Amityville Curse was about at all. The Amityville Curse was barely even an Amityville movie at all.
Marvin (David Stein) was a psychologist checking out the town of Amityville. He came upon a house, not THE house, that he thought he could renovate and flip. He invited his friends Debbie (Dawna Wightman), Frank (Kim Coates), Bill (Anthony Dean Rubeš), and Abigail (Cassandra Gava) to help renovate. The five friends soon experienced strange happenings in the house. It turned out that it was a former clergy house where a murder happened, and the darkness of that event was still haunting the place.
As you may be able to see, there was no connection to the original Amityville home in The Amityville Curse. The movie made the decision to have the terror be more of a city-wide thing than that one specific house. They were in a former clergy house. There was no entrance to Hell in the basement. Instead, there was a confession booth from the house’s time as a clergy house. It was the confession booth where a priest (Jan RubeÅ¡) had been murdered twelve years earlier. That booth was where the demonic presence was centred. It was tied to that booth. It wasn’t tied to the original Amityville house. The only reason it was even an Amityville movie at all was the fact that it was set in Amityville. The town, not 112 Ocean Avenue.
The Amityville Curse was the first Amityville movie to be released direct-to-video. This meant a few things. The recognizable, established at the time, names would disappear. It was 1990 and direct-to-video productions didn’t have even the small amount of respect they get now. No big stars were going to sign on to something that didn’t make it either into theaters or onto television screens. Secondly, it took on some co-financing from Canada. That’s something that a lot of direct-to-video movies seem to do. They move the production to Canada to get some tax cuts. They hire local Canadian actors to fill the roles that the big names didn’t want. In the case of The Amityville Curse, it also meant that the house could not be there because it was in the USA. So they had a completely different house.
Not all things about Canadian direct-to-video productions are bad. Sometimes, those local Canadian actors are recognizable people from other Canadian productions. They are working actors in the Canadian film and television industry who pop up in Canadian produced things on the regular. And sometimes, they are actors simply kick-starting successful future careers that would cross borders. They were actors who would become Hollywood famous. That was sort of what happened with Kim Coates. He earned himself a role in the fifth Amityville movie and used it as a starting point for a career as a recognizable character actor in things like Goon, The Last Boy Scout, Prison Break, Sons of Anarchy, and Bad Boys. That’s a highlight of any direct-to-video production, really. Early performances by people you recognize in the years that follow.
The Amityville Curse was a little on the disappointing side. It wasn’t a bad movie. It was definitely a step up, in terms of quality, from Amityville: The Evil Escapes. The problem was that it didn’t feel like an Amityville movie. I know that I’m going to end up watching other Amityville movies that are even less connected, but this one was part of the original run. It wasn’t one of the offshoots where someone just threw Amityville in the title. It was a franchise release. It felt like one of those releases, though. There was no connection to the original house or any of the movies that came before. It was a different house that just happened to be in the same town. It was a weird inclusion for a franchise that had, until this point, been so focused on the events of 112 Ocean Avenue.
That about does it for the two middle entries in the original run of Amityville movies. It was a transitional period for the franchise. Not only did it change how the movies were being released, first going to television then going to direct-to-video, but this period also changed what stories were being told. The movies were no longer based on real people connected to 112 Ocean Avenue. There were still, in the case of Amityville: The Evil Escapes, connections to the house and the evil in it. However, there were no characters based on real people. The franchise had moved into wholly original territory.
The transition would find completion with the next entry, which I’ll pick up on in the next post. The franchise would turn into a cursed object franchise, where each movie would have an evil object from the Amityville house. That concept could already be seen in Amityville: The Evil Escapes through the lamp. Things would be improved with the later entries, though. I’ll get into that soon. I’m just going to say that the movies improve for a while.
Here are the notes:
- Patty Duke has now been in two Sunday “Bad” Movies. She was in Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes and The Swarm (week 253).
- Warren Munson returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies with Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, as well. He was previously in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (week 294).
- Mark Camacho was in The Amityville Curse. He was also in How the Toys Saved Christmas (week 158), Nine Lives (week 228), Snake Eater III: His Law (week 320), and The Adventures of Pluto Nash (week 446). That puts him in the five-timers club.
- The Amityville Curse saw Kim Coates return to Sunday “Bad” Movies for the third time after appearing in Officer Downe (week 242) and Battlefield Earth (week 275).
- Finally, Ted A. Bohus was in The Deadly Spawn (week 19) and The Amityville Curse.
- Have you seen Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes or The Amityville Curse? What did you think? Drop a comment or let me know on Twitter.
- If there are any suggestions you have for movies I should watch as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies, hit me up. You can find me on Twitter or in the comments.
- Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram and sometimes posts stuff. Check it out.
- The next post up will be covering the next three movies in the Amityville saga. I’ll be writing about Amityville: It’s About Time, Amityville: A New Generation, and Amityville Dollhouse. I’ll see you soon for that post. It shouldn’t take long to go up.
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