Amityville has been around for a long time. First off, it’s a place. It is an area of Long Island in New York. Nobody thought much of it until the DeFeo family was murdered by one of the sons, Ron Jr. It was an unexpected tragedy. Following the murders, the Lutz family moved into the house. They left a short time later, claiming that some sort of paranormal activity occurred. The Warrens (yes, the people depicted in the Conjuring franchise) were brought in to investigate, and things blew up. Not literally. Figuratively. The story of the paranormal happenings gained immense popularity.
A book was written by Jay Anson about the family’s experiences living in the house. Then a movie was made. The book and movie were each popular in their own ways, spinning off a massive franchise that is still kind of going. I’ll get to that in a moment. The book spawned numerous sequels by John G. Jones and Robin Karl, which, of course, threw the legitimacy of the story into the wind. Nobody believes it anymore. Another book series spawned when Hans Holzer spoke to Ron DeFeo Jr. about the murders and wrote about them.
The first film, The Amityville Horror, was an adaptation of the Jay Anson novel. It did so well that a prequel was commissioned, adapted from Holzer’s book about Ron DeFeo Jr. From there, the movies took their own route through the Amityville mythology, occasionally returning to adapt another book, such as Holzer’s The Amityville Curse. In all, there were nine movies in the main Amityville franchise. The newest one was the 2005 remake of the story that kicked it all off.
For week 500 of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I plan to watch and write about all nine main Amityville movies, and as many offshoot sort of Amityville movies as I can. There have been 32 movies involving Amityville or the name, at the time that I began writing about them. That’s a lot of ground to cover. Hopefully I can get to all of them (Spoiler: I didn’t). I must start somewhere, though, and that takes me back to the beginning. Let’s kick things of with…
The Amityville Horror (1979)
It’s January 7th as I start my journey through the Amityville movies. That gives me about five months to speed through as many of these as I can. I’m watching these in between other bad movies I need to watch for this blog and writing about the movies in between the other posts I’m writing. Bear with me if the tone jumps around from movie to movie.
Anyway, let me start by saying I’ve seen four Amityville movies before. As a kid, I had a DVD box set of the first three Amityville movies. I still have it. It’s how I will be watching the first three movies. I watched The Amityville Horror and Amityville II: The Possession a bunch for like two years when I was like 11 and 12 or something. I never actually watched the third one, though. So, I’ve seen the first two. What were the other two I saw? One of them was the remake from 2005. The other was one of the post-remake movies that isn’t part of the main series, but instead a movie where someone just used the Amityville name. It was a movie called Amityville Death House. I’ll write more about that one when I get to it.
When I was a kid, The Amityville Horror was a semi-frightening movie. I was a kid. There were things I still remembered. The spooky voices, the way the house morphed near the end, the eye windows, and the babysitter scene all stuck with me. There were a lot of things, however, that I remembered differently. Most notably, for whatever reason, was an image of George Lutz (James Brolin) carrying the family dog down the stairs while the house was in shambles around him. That image, which was stuck in my head, wasn’t quite right. It was kind of a combination of the family fleeing the house and George carrying the dog outside. Oh well.
One thing I completely forgot was in The Amityville Horror was the subplot with Father Delaney (Rod Steiger). I didn’t remember any of that. I was under the impression that he showed up at the house, went into the one room, had flies all over him, heard the voices scream for him to get out, left the house, and that was it. Instead, the movie kept going back to him as his mental state deteriorated alongside the Lutz family. As their situation got worse, so did his. The last we saw, he was essentially catatonic on a park bench. Continually going back to his part of the story really took away from the suspense of what was happening in the house.
The last thing I want to touch upon with The Amityville Horror is the idea of twin movies. People always discuss the same movies when they talk about twin movies. Armageddon and Deep Impact. Volcano and Dante’s Peak. White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Observe and Report. I never really hear about how The Amityville Horror shared many elements with The Shining, which came out a year later. Maybe it’s because the did more different than the same. But there were a lot of the same elements there. The families in each film lived somewhere new. Something horrible happened in that place in the past. The father slowly lost his mind, being possessed, in a way, by the place they were living. He carried around an axe, eventually banging it against the door of a bathroom where people hid. There was a child with what an imaginary friend that might not have been an imaginary friend. The mother saw an animal person in a bedroom. The walls bled.
Of course, the differences might steer people away from the similarities. The Shining involved a lot of isolation where The Amityville Horror was set in the city. Hotel versus house. The size of the families were different. The Amityville Horror had the priest subplot. Even with the similarities, there were major differences that set the movies apart. I just thought that it needed to be noted how similar they were. Now it’s time to get onto the second movie, a prequel to the original.
Amityville II: The Possession
Alright. So maybe that wasn’t a prequel. There was absolutely nothing within Amityville II: The Possession that explicitly made it a prequel. I think I was just under that assumption because it was based on events that happened before the events of The Amityville Horror. That doesn’t necessarily mean it took place before the first movie, though. Based on what the first movie showed, Amityville II didn’t depict the events that were alluded to. Things simply had a familiar feeling.
The real murders that took place in the Amityville house involved the DeFeo family. They weren’t mentioned by name in The Amityville Horror, but the son murdering his family while they slept was brought up. It was even mentioned that the son looked like the physically and mentally deteriorating George Lutz. The sequel didn’t show anyone who looked like George. Instead, we had the Montelli family and their son, Sonny (Jack Magner). He was not the person pictured in the first film. After the murder of the Montelli family at the hands of Sonny, Father Frank Adamsky (James Olson) took it upon himself to figure out what really happened to the family that attended his church. Possession. It was possession.
Amityville II: The Possession pulled elements from the DeFeo family when the story was being written. First and most obvious was that the son of a family in the Amityville house killed the entire family at night. The second thing was Sonny’s contentious relationship with his father, Anthony (Burt Young). That was pulled directly from Ronald DeFeo Sr. and Ronald DeFeo Jr. There was an incestuous relationship between Sonny and his sister Patricia (Diane Franklin) that was based on rumours about Ronald Jr. and his sister Dawn. Though, I can only find people talking about the rumours. I don’t see any source for the rumours. I don’t know if the rumours are rumours or just rumours about rumours.
Even with those elements in place, there were some major differences. Ronald DeFeo Jr. wasn’t possessed. He came up with a bunch of different stories about what happened in their house that night. In each of them, he knew what was going on. He hadn’t lost control of his senses. He was aware. The back half of Amityville II: The Possession was about Sonny being possessed, with the possession being the reason for the murders. So, yeah, that part wasn’t accurate. Oh, and there was the part where the family was awake when they were killed, which was the opposite of the real murders.
The thing that really made Amityville II: The Possession feel like a semi-disconnected movie that just happened to be set in the Amityville house was the layout of the house. The outer façade was the same one that had been used in the filming of The Amityville Horror. The inside was shot at a different studio, and the change in the inner layout really stood out. The changes were most apparent in the basement. A major point in The Amityville Horror was that there was a hidden red room beneath the basement stairs. The family dog spent a good amount of time digging its way into that room. It was hidden behind the bricks beneath the stairs, and opened into a pit of oil that was considered the door to Hell. Amityville II: The Possession didn’t have the red room. The stairs were just some wooden stairs that came down into the middle of the basement. Instead, there was a hidden crawlspace that opened into a black room filled with mud and cobwebs. Sometimes there were glowing pillar things as well. It was a completely different room that opened to a different Hell.
So, I don’t know if Amityville II: The Possession was actually a prequel. It was based on the DeFeo murders, which took place before The Amityville Horror, but it didn’t entirely line up with what the previous film set up. There were no time stamps to say when it was set. The possibility of it being a prequel was there, as was the possibility of it being a sequel where the events just happened to mirror the DeFeo murders. Either way, it felt more like an anthology that didn’t tie into the first movie at all, beyond the house. I think the entire franchise will feel that way.
Amityville 3-D
I don’t even know what to make of this franchise. Each of the first three films were connected but disconnected. The events took place, yet didn’t have a real effect on what followed. None of the hauntings felt similar in any way whatsoever. The way the house connected to Hell changed between movies without any explanation as to why. No characters returned from one movie to the next. The house was the same, though, which made for a strange pseudo-continuity. At the same time, it seemed like each of the first three movies was an inaccurate adaptation of real-life events surrounding the house, rather than a continuation of the story from any of the other movies. Kind of like a soft reboot each time.
Sorry. All of this has been rattling around in my head for a few days before writing this portion of this post. I truly am confused by the Amityville movies at this point. The first film was based on the book, The Amityville Horror, which was the highly likely fictional tale of a family that moved into a supposedly haunted house in Amityville. They were haunted right out of the house. The reason it was haunted? A mass murder that happened when Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his entire family as they slept. Amityville II: The Possession was a pseudo-prequel that took the DeFeo story and fictionalized it by changing details and adding a demonic possession element to it. Amityville 3-D was based on Stephen Kaplan, a skeptic trying to prove that the Lutz family lied about the haunting. Of course, in the movie, they weren’t lying. The house was haunted.
The thing about the sequels was that the Lutz family would not give the filmmakers the rights to their names. Since Amityville II and Amityville 3-D weren’t based on any stories from the Lutzes, they didn’t want to be involved at all. There were potential lawsuits and all that jazz. Thus, the main character of Amityville 3-D could not reference the Lutz family or the events of the first movie. He could reference the earlier murders, which he did by calling them the DeFeo murders, which meant he wasn’t referencing Amityville II, since the family had been renamed the Montellis. Thus, all three movies were based on connected events that happened in real life, but may not have shared film continuity with each other.
Anyway, I should get onto what Amityville 3-D was. John Baxter (Tony Roberts) was a skeptic who made it his job to reveal hoaxes. He frequently worked with Dr. Elliot West (Robert Joy) and Melanie (Candy Clark) to prove the supernatural wasn’t real. After shining a light on some fraudsters who were using the Amityville house to trick people out of their money, John bought the house. Strange things started happening to everyone around him, but he kept looking for scientific reasoning. People were dying and he said it wasn’t the house. It was just accidents. It would take seeing ghosts and demons for John to believe.
Amityville 3-D continued to have the 1970s vibe that the previous two entries in the franchise had. I don’t entirely know how to describe it. There’s just a vibe that I’ve frequently gotten from 1970s horror. I think it has to do with the tone. The movies took themselves seriously and used a kind of sedate cinematography style. They weren’t as flashy as the movies that started popping up in the 1980s. The colours weren’t as vivid. The movies weren’t going for as much fun. They were staying in the slow-burn horror feel. The Amityville movies, at least through the first three, were within that 70s horror realm.
There was an attempt within Amityville 3-D at that fun 80s vibe. There was, of course, the inclusion of 3-D that had things being directed at the screen at a regular basis. Frisbees, poles, and even a demon head shot toward the screen. If I had a 3-D compatible version of the movie with the proper 3-D glasses, that side of the movie might have been a little more interesting. The other fun elements were part of the structure of the film. Rather than the slow burn and religious stuff from the first film, things got dangerous much more quickly. The realtor of the Amityville house died in the house immediately after selling it. Melanie and John were both tormented by the spirits in life-threatening ways. Melanie was killed soon after. And that was only halfway through the movie. Things amped up quicker to try and catch the attention of movie-goers who were more fascinated with the slasher movies of the time.
The last thing that should be mentioned about Amityville 3-D is that it had early appearances for both Lori Loughlin and Meg Ryan. Loughlin played the daughter of John Baxter, who became a key part of the story. Meg Ryan played her best friend. Unlike other roles in the franchise thus far, where a major actor was brought in to give star power, the two women were rising stars at the time. They hadn’t become the names that people would later know them as. It was a classic case of people using horror films as an early steppingstone in their careers as they went on to stardom. Or, in Lori Loughlin’s case, stardom and then infamy because of a college admissions scandal.
All in all, Amityville 3-D was the lesser of the three Amityville movies so far. It was an attempt to keep true to the vibe of the first two movies, while toning down the seriousness and bringing in the 1980s fun. It ended up landing somewhere in between, in a way that didn’t quite work. That brought an end to the theatrical entries. For the time being, at least. The Amityville franchise would return to the theater two decades later. Before that, though, there were a bunch of television and direct-to-video installments
And that’s where I’m going to wrap up this first, technically second if you count the intro post, look at the Amityville movies. It seems like a fitting place to take a break. As the franchise transitions out of the theaters, the posts transition from one to the next. We’ve seen three theatrical movies that based their stories on the stories of real people involved in the 112 Ocean Avenue escapades. There was one about the Lutz family, one about the Montellis (based on the DeFeos), and one about John Baxter (based on Stephen Kaplan. They were the story that made the franchise, what happened before, and what followed. A nice trilogy of stories surrounding the Lutz family and Jay Anson novel.
I had a good time with the first three Amityville movies. They may not have been as fun as some of the movies that came later in the franchise, but they weren’t meant to be. They were meant to build a spooky sort of tone and, for the most part, succeeded. Well, the first one succeeded, the second one mostly succeeded, and the third one was kind of questionable with the scares. The franchise was about to go downhill fast, though, and that’s why I’m watching the movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies.
Here some notes for the first three Amityville movies:
- Hank Garrett appeared in The Amityville Horror. He was previously in Baby Geniuses (week 50), Sniper (week 430), and Maniac Cop 2 (week 480).
- The Amityville Horror was Margot Kidder’s third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance after GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords (week 224) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (week 403).
- Eddie Barth was in Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever (week 108) and The Amityville Horror.
- Don Stroud returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in The Amityville Horror after first appearing in Frogtown II (week 334).
- Finishing off The Amityville Horror was Helen Shaver from Tremors II: Aftershocks (week 360).
- Amityville II: The Possession featured Rutanya Alda from Steel (week 127) and Rappin’ (week 350).
- Burt Young has now been in three Sunday “Bad” Movies. He was in Going Overboard (week 67), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (week 446), and Amityville II: The Possession.
- Leonardo Cimino has been in Hudson Hawk (week 232) and Amityville II: The Possession.
- And finishing off Amityville II: The Possession was Ted Ross from Police Academy (week 400).
- Candy Clark appeared in Amityville 3-D, Starcrash (week 1), and Cool as Ice (week 348).
- Tony Roberts played John Baxter in Amityville 3-D. He was also in The Million Dollar Duck (week 119).
- Tess Harper was in Ishtar (week 192) and Amityville 3-D.
- Peter Kowanko popped up in Amityville 3-D. You may have noticed him previously in Solarbabies (week 416).
- Amityville 3-D wasn’t the first time Lori Loughlin showed up in Sunday “Bad” Movies. She was in a little movie called Rad (week 444).
- Finally, Neill Barry showed up in Amityville 3-D after an appearance in Atlas Shrugged: Part I (week 490).
- Have you seen any of the original three Amityville movies? What did you think? You can share your thoughts with me in the comments or on Twitter.
- Do you have any movies that you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies? Let me know what they are. Find me on Twitter or leave a comment.
- Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram, so give that a look.
- You probably know what the next post will be. I’m not nearly done with my look at the Amityville movies and I have a bunch more to go. The next post will cover Amityville: The Evil Escapes and The Amityville Curse. If you want to see more of my thoughts on the Amityville movies, come on back for that one. It’ll be up pretty soon, I hope.
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