The haunting and murders at 112 Ocean Avenue have been the source of terror for many stories for decades. The DeFeo murders happened in 1974. The Lutz family lived in the house in 1975. The Amityville Horror was released as a novel in 1977 and a movie in 1979. Things blew up from there with numerous books and movies through the 80s and 90s. The movies went dormant between 1996 and 2005, and then again from 2005 until 2011. It’s after that where we pick up.
The release of The Amityville Haunting in 2011 signified a new era of Amityville movies emerging. After a singular series of movies and a remake, the door was open to anyone to make their own interpretation of the material. I don’t know if it was a rights availability thing, or if it was the ability of the average person to get some decent film equipment. Either way, there was an explosion of Amityville movies on the horizon. An explosion that hasn’t subsided since.
The Amityville Haunting clearly kicked that explosion off. It was The Asylum doing their standard mockbuster thing, only using the Amityville name while doing it. It wasn’t released around the time of the theatrical remake. It was six years later. Its release showed that the Amityville movies didn’t need bigger budgets or big Hollywood backing to be made. Anyone could take whatever equipment they could get their hands on, throw some people on the screen, and tell their own Amityville story. It was a franchise where continuity had never been a thing, so it didn’t matter if they followed any of the other stories. The movies were going to be standalone anyway.
There was a six-year gap between the remake The Amityville Horror and The Amityville Haunting. There would only be two years between The Amityville Haunting and the next Amityville movie. The gaps between movies would never be that large again. We’re only in 2022 right now, and since the release of The Amityville Haunting, there have been at least twenty-three other Amityville movies released. I’m going to get into four of them in this post, though one of them is really just to say why I didn’t watch it. Let’s get started then.
The Amityville Asylum
I think the Amityville movies are going to go downhill real fast. There’s something about the 2010s where it just clicked for people that they could make any Amityville movie they wanted. They could use the name, maybe take some of the mythology, and do whatever the hell they felt like. This was one of those movies, placing an asylum on the property formerly known as 112 Ocean Avenue. It took some of the DeFeo stuff and basically ignored anything from any other Amityville story.
Lisa Templeton (Sophia Del Pizzo) interviewed for a custodial job at High Hopes Psychiatric Hospital. Soon after she started, Lisa began seeing things. She saw patients that other staff members swore weren’t patients. She heard things that other staff said she couldn’t have possibly heard. She had to be making it up. When Lisa looked into it further, she discovered that the hospital was built on the grounds of the famous Amityville house and the strange things were associated with some cult activity that went on in the house. Someone was trying to kill people for their own immortality. Lisa had to stop them.
The story itself wasn’t too bad. It kind of took the ending twist of the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror and expanded that idea. In a different way, of course. Someone was using the patients at the hospital for their own gain. Their own supernatural gain. It tied into the DeFeo murders in a way that felt real to the movie. Past and present mirroring sort of thing. History repeating itself. That was all good. The story was solid.
It was the filmmaking techniques that really ruined what could have been a solid Amityville entry. Specifically, the sound mixing was some of the worst work I’ve seen done in any movie. There were the stereotypical stings when a twist happened. Kind of like the “dun dun dunnnnnn” of the dramatic gopher or whatever. But then there were the multiple times when two characters would have a conversation filled with important dialogue and the music would turn up so loud that it was impossible to decipher what anyone said. Unless you used subtitles or could read lips, I guess. Sometimes, the audience’s lack of hearing the dialogue could help with a movie or television show. I’m thinking of something like when Michael left The Office and there was that shot of him and Pam talking without the audience being able to hear. But there’s a specific time for something like that to be used, and it’s not when the villain is revealing their true nature.
The other odd thing was the setting. It’s not strange for an Amityville movie to be set in Amityville. That was perfectly fine. It was the accents that didn’t quite make sense. The Amityville Asylum was a British movie, so it had a bunch of British actors filling the roles. Most of them didn’t try to hide their accents. Yes, there would be British people in America. That’s how immigration works. But for a movie set on Long Island to feature so many British people working in an asylum… It felt off and broke some of the suspension of disbelief. Had it been set in, say, Liverpool, I probably wouldn’t have a problem with it. It was set in Long Island, New York, though. That was strange.
The sound mixing really was the killer for The Amityville Asylum. It continuously broke any tension that was building up. It kept muddying the waters of the story, making it more incomprehensible. I was still able to get the basics and understand that there was potential for a decent Amityville story here. The asylum was built on the grounds of the Amityville house. The deaths of six people on that land would grant someone immunity. They would be able to live forever. The runtime was spent having Lisa dig into the history of the DeFeo murders and discover why they mattered in the present day. That’s a solid story. It just happened to be ruined by atrocious sound design and mixing. I wish it hadn’t because I like the idea of history repeating itself. It’s an idea that continued into the next movie.
The Amityville Theater
Okay, so The Amityville Theater was kind of a mix between The Amityville Curse and The Amityville Asylum. It took the history repeating itself part of The Amityville Asylum and combined it with the part of The Amityville Curse where it was the whole town of Amityville that was cursed. Like the movie that came before it, there was potential in the story. Not quite the same amount of potential, thanks to the essentially single-location setting. But there was potential if the world expanded a little.
Fawn Herriman (Monele LeStrat) inherited an old theatre in Amityville after the untimely deaths of her parents. The type of theatre that puts on plays, not a movie theatre. She invited four friends to join her as she spent her vacation visiting the abandoned theatre that was now hers. As they investigated the theatre, the friends found out that all was not what it seemed. There were some spooky things going on, and it would only be a matter of time before they came face-to-face with them. While the friends were investigating, Fawn’s teacher Victor (John R. Walker) researched the theater and realized he had to go there to warn Fawn about the danger she was going to experience.
The theatre of The Amityville Theater was not located on the same grounds as the infamous Amityville house. It was its own thing located in Amityville. That was what put it in the same territory as The Amityville Curse. It wasn’t the house or that property that the evil had gotten into. The entire town was a danger spot. The entire town was a gateway to Hell, causing horrible things to happen to the people within. I didn’t like that idea when it was used in The Amityville Curse, mostly because the entire story felt disconnected from the rest of the franchise. It worked a little better in The Amityville Theater because there was some connective tissue.
That tissue came in the form of Victor’s research. As he reached out to various sources to find out what danger awaited in the theater, he discovered a series of deaths. The DeFeo murders were only one mass murder in a long line of mass deaths that had happened in Amityville. When he dug further, he discovered that there was a ritual where six people would be sacrificed to six demons that the town had “wronged” many years ago. It happened time and time again. Fawn and her four friends, as well as a squatter they found in the theater, were set to be the next sacrifices, just as the DeFeos had been sacrifices. History was repeating itself by way of the DeFeo murders. It was all connected.
Even though I liked the idea of the town of Amityville sacrificing six people every once in a while to appease the demons, it wasn’t enough to make The Amityville Theater a good movie. There were some major issues. One, outside of the few scenes of Victor’s journey to the theatre, the movie was set in an abandoned theater. There were really only four locations in the theater and only one of them was exciting in any way. There was a dressing room without furniture. There was a stairwell. There was a basement. And then there was the main theatre hall, which had the stage, the seats, and the balcony. It had some substance to it that the movie could use. People appearing in different places, falling, screams echoing. Stuff like that. For the most part, though, the abandoned theatre wasn’t utilized as a good location.
Then there was the acting. None of the acting in The Amityville Theater was good. Everyone felt stiff to the point that nothing was believable. Unconvincing angry acting is the worst and there was a bunch of that. Nobody was conveying the emotions of the situation they were in. It was all hollow bickering that didn’t feel realistic. It was painful to sit through.
I’ve really gotten into the worst of the Amityville movies now. The era of people doing whatever they want with the DeFeo murders and interpolating whatever they want from the source material is in full swing. Hopefully, there are some better ones. After these two, pretty much anything would be a step in the right direction.
Amityville Death House
Okay, here we go. This one isn’t necessarily a good movie. But it’s at least entertaining and watchable. That’s something. I really needed that after The Amityville Asylum and The Amityville Theater. It was competently made, which was all the difference needed to give it some sort of life. If only any Amityville movie could reach that low, low bar.
Amityville Death House was the brainchild of Mark Polonia. Tiffany (Kyrsten St. Pierre) and her friends went to Amityville to check on her grandmother. Things got spooky rather fast with strange noises and sights all through the night. The whole while, Sheriff McGrath (Ken Van Sant) was investigating some missing townspeople. One woman had gone missing from her car. A squirrel hunter went missing while hunting squirrels. That sort of stuff. Both stories were being manipulated by a warlock (Eric Roberts), seeking revenge for the lynching of a witch many years prior.
I’m not going to sit here an say that Amityville Death House was a masterpiece. It wasn’t. It still came in among the lower entries in the Amityville… It’s not a franchise at this point. Is it a genre? I don’t know. It’s one of the lower end Amityville movies, though. That said, it did some stuff that the bottom-of-the-barrel Amityville movies didn’t do. Particularly, the sound design was a little better, the acting was a little better, and it didn’t have a demonic lamp. I guess you could say it avoided the mistakes that the others made.
The acting in Amityville Death House wasn’t great, but it had something that was missing in the previous Amityville movie. The actors felt like they were having conversations with each other. They weren’t just reciting dialogue stiffly. Sure, a couple of the actors still gave hollow performances, but at least it felt like they were interacting with other people. Some of the actors were good, too. Eric Roberts, giving what I’m pretty sure was just a voice performance, gave some gravitas to everything. St. Pierre and Van Sant were also good in their respective roles.
The biggest issue I had with Amityville Death House was how little it tied into the Amityville mythos. The haunting that the characters were experiencing didn’t really connect to the DeFeos, the Lutzes, or anything that happened in the 112 Ocean Avenue house. The closest there was to a connection was that the witch who had been lynched had lived in a house with moon-eye windows. It wasn’t the same house. It just shared the look of the windows. That was a tenuous connection. Instead, the mythos was that a witch who had been lynched was seeking revenge on the descendants of the people who lynched her. That was more a revenge story than an Amityville story.
As for what Amityville Death House actually did well, there was some good effects work. This mostly came in the climactic moments as the spells of the warlock were taking full hold. I’m not going to get too much into them, but there were some well done prosthetic effects. It would have been easy to fumble this aspect of the movie, or to hide the effects behind dark and shadow. That wasn’t so much the case. The effects were featured, and they were well done for the low budget the movie clearly had. That was impressive.
Amityville Death House wasn’t a perfect film. By no means was it perfect. It had some issues. It was disconnected from the Amityville lore and could have been set anywhere. Some of the acting lacked the depth and emotion it needed to really sell the scares. But it was a nice step up from the movies that immediately preceded it in the Amityville series. I think this is the quality range things will be hanging out around from now on, so my hopes aren’t too high. There’s always a chance something could be better than this. We’ll see.
Amityville: Vanishing Point
I didn’t watch this one. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. There was just no accessible way for me to watch it, so I had to skip onto the next one. Maybe, one day, I’ll come back to it when I have a way to watch it. I’m sure there will be other Amityville movies to watch, too.
The abundance of Amityville movies that came out post-remake meant that there was a better chance to have a bad one. There were a few reasons for that. One was just simple math. More means a higher chance of something. With one movie, you have one chance for good or bad. With fifty movies, you have fifty chances. Simple as that. Two was the lower budgets. A lower budget leads to fewer resources, or fewer good resources. There might not be any good actors available with such low pay. And then there was three, experience. The earlier Amityville movies were backed by production companies that had Hollywood history. They made sure to hire crew that had experience and could guarantee certain filmmaking standards. Lower budget independent movies don’t have that luxury. Whoever they get is who they get, and they just have to work with it.
The Amityville Asylum, The Amityville Theater, and Amityville Death House were perfect examples of that. The Amityville Asylum was able to pull together a decent cast, but they couldn’t quite nail the sound design. The Amityville Theater had some decent writing, but fell flat when bringing in actors. Amityville Death House had a more experienced director in Mark Polonia, who was able to bring things together to make something decent, even if it didn’t quite compare to the stuff that bigger production companies had done with the Amityville movies.
I could go on and on about the Amityville movies. There are enough of them that someone could write a five-hundred-page book analyzing them all and still be nowhere near done discussing them. That’s not my place. At least, right now, it’s not. I’m not getting paid for this. I’m doing it out of my own… I wouldn’t call it enjoyment. I’ve enjoyed some of them, but not all of them. I’m doing this just because I am. And I’m running out of time, so I’m not going to get to them all right now. I’ve got enough time for three more and I’ll get to them soon.
Here are some notes for these three movies:
- Mark Polonia directed Amityville Death House. He also directed Bigfoot vs. Zombies (week 218).
- Amityville Death House was the sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Eric Roberts, who was previously in A Talking Cat!?! (week 94), Chicks Dig Gay Guys (week 145), The Human Centipede III (week 180), DOA: Dead or Alive (week 191), and Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls (week 208).
- Gary Martin was in The Amityville Theater and Slaughter High (week 279).
- Five actors from Bigfoot vs. Zombies (week 218) were in Amityville Death House. They were Todd Carpenter, Steve Diasparra, Danielle Donahue, Jeff Kirkendall, and Ken Van Sant.
- Finally, John Migliore popped up in Amityville Death House. He was also in Antisocial (week 214).
- Have you seen The Amityville Asylum? Have you seen The Amityville Theatre? Have you seen Amityville Death House? What did you think of them? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
- Hit me up on Twitter with any suggestions of movies I should be checking out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. You could also leave any suggestions in the comments. Tell me what I should see.
- Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram, so why not head over there and take a look?
- There’s one more post to go in this big Amityville journey. For the time being, at least. I’ll surely get back around to the Amityville movies at some point. The next post will cover the last three movies I watched. I’ll be writing about The Amityville Legacy, The Amityville Terror, and Amityville: No Escape. That post should go up sometime soon.
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