The Amityville Horror (2005) and The Amityville Haunting (2011)

The Amityville Horror came out in 1979, sparking a franchise that would last decades. The original run of movies went through the 1980s and into the 1990s. There were three theatrical movies, one television movie, and a handful of direct-to-video releases. Following 1996’s Amityville Dollhouse, things went dormant. There were no new stories in the Amityville saga that came out for nine years. Things were quiet. The horror landscape had changed with teen slashers taking the spotlight. That wasn’t what The Amityville Horror was about.

The horror landscape changed again in the mid-2000s. After an abundance of teen slashers, people were ready for a change. However, the change they wanted was familiarity. Both the audience and the producers wanted that familiarity. They got it through remakes. There were slasher remakes, thriller remakes, remakes of Japanese horror. Among all these, The Amityville Horror got new life. The Amityville Horror got remade.

Every few years, the horror landscape changes. The remakes were one of many changes. Over the following years, horror would splinter into many different arms. There were the torture porn movies, the found footage movies, the Paranormal Activity kind of found footage movies, and the mockbusters. Most importantly, though, was the rise of easy access equipment. At this point, almost anybody can get a good camera. Cell phones come with them and almost everyone has a cell phone. It means that anyone can make a movie if they so choose. Add that to nobody having the rights to the name Amityville or the DeFeo story, and you get a lot of people making their own Amityville movies. I’ll be heading into one of those movies in this post, but first…

The Amityville Horror

When the franchise was rebooted in the mid-2000s, producers Michael Bay, Andrew Form, and Brad Fuller decided to retell the story that kicked things off in the 1970s. It was time to revisit the Lutz family and the terror they experienced while living in Amityville. Things would be a little different, as more details had been added to the story in the nearly three decades since the release of the Jay Anson novel. Some of these elements and some original elements were added to give the movie a completely different feel from what came before.

Once again, there was the Lutz family. George (Ryan Reynolds) had recently married Kathy (Melissa George). They and their three children moved into 112 Ocean Avenue, a house that was selling for a low price because a mass murder had recently happened. As soon as they moved in, George’s personality changed. He turned darker. He became more threatening. All the while, strange things happened in the house. Chelsea Lutz (Chloë Grace Moretz) had an imaginary friend who pushed her into exceedingly dangerous situations. It was becoming too much. The family had to flee or else they would lose their lives.

The biggest difference was the origin of the haunting. The original gave the idea that there was a door to Hell in the basement. It was this door that allowed a demonic force to enter the Amityville house and influence the people living there. That wasn’t the case in the remake. Instead of a door to Hell in the basement, there was a hidden sanitarium. Or hidden torture dungeon. Something like that. The demonic force was the spirit of an evil man named Ketchum who had tortured people years earlier in this blocked off area. The bodies of the tortured who died were tossed in the lake. When Ketchum was about to be caught, he slashed his own throat to spray both his blood and spirit everywhere. It would allow him to live on in that house.

That’s a major deviation from the original movie. Was that the “more details?” According to the real George Lutz, he hadn’t been consulted on any of this, so it’s likely that any additional information was made up. Not that his original recounting of events wasn’t also fictional. Other changes were that the dog died in the remake, they knocked out George to escape on the boat (in the original he just kind of snapped out of it and ran out with them), and much less focus on the religious aspects. The house also looked a lot different. It was filmed in a completely different part of the country, meaning they filmed at a completely different house. They couldn’t use the same exteriors they used in the original three movies. It retained the quarter moon eye windows that it was famous for, though, so that’s something.

Ryan Reynolds was the movie’s biggest weakness. He was good in the beginning as the likeable new father figure for the family. It was the shift to darkness that didn’t quite work. The current Ryan Reynolds could pull off the terror that George Lutz was supposed to bring, but the Ryan Reynolds of 2004/2005 hadn’t had enough experience outside of comedy to nail the transition. Sure, part of that was the writing. It shifted the character much to quickly from affable to off-putting. Yet, I come back to Reynolds performance and think it just wasn’t nuanced enough in that middle area of the movie.

All that said, I still kind of enjoyed the 2005 version of The Amityville Horror. It wasn’t the best in the franchise, but it also wasn’t the worst. It had some things going for it, including the performances of the children. The three kids were all good throughout the movie, pushing the terror they were feeling onto the audience. The editing was very much a mid-2000s style. It worked for what the movie was, though. Plus, the scenes where the family was in danger on the roof and scampering across the roof were well done. That was a great thing that made the movie stand out.

With that, I’m going to move into the mockbuster realm for the next Amityville movie. The strange thing about the mockbuster was that it wasn’t even made at the same time as The Amityville Horror. It came six years later, instead cashing in on the Paranormal Activity craze. However, it shared many story elements with the Amityville movies, justifying the use of Amityville in the name and setting. Let’s get to it.

The Amityville Haunting

This was an interesting entry in the Amityville mythology. It was meant to take place in the same house where Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his family, and later where the Lutz family would experience their haunting. The thing was, they were at a completely different house. They showed an exterior at the beginning that looked like the famous Amityville house as a group of teenagers explored, sexed it up, and got killed. Then the main character family moved into the house and every exterior from that point on was of a different house entirely. There were only two floors and a crawlspace. Maybe it was a basement? Nobody ever explored it. The original Amityville house had two floors and a basement, plus the attic area where the windows were. It was a wholly different, clearly Los Angeles house being passed off as the Amityville house.

Okay, now that that’s out of my system, I’m going to get into the quality of The Amityville Haunting. There was no reason for it to be an Amityville movie beyond the name recognition. I’m not just saying that because the house was different. There were other major differences that changed the entire feel of the movie from all the other Amityville movies. First and foremost was the format in which it was presented. The Amityville Haunting was a found footage movie. The most prominent camera was a handheld that Tyler Benson (Devin Clark) used throughout the movie. He kept claiming that he was making a documentary, but never explained what it was about. Around the halfway point, Tyler’s dad, Douglas (Jason Williams), installed security cameras in the house. The entire movie was presented through the security cameras and the handheld.

The haunting was also different from what other Amityville movies had shown. That was a good thing in many cases. The time manipulation of Amityville: It’s About Time, the family connection of Amityville: A New Generation, and the dollhouse in Amityville Dollhouse all gave some new ways for the evil to torment the main characters. It was always torment, though. The evil had simply been evil. It possessed people to do things or manipulated them to do things. It was rarely ever the physical cause of death, merely the instigator. The Amityville Haunting had the evil directly attacking people and killing them. That was an entirely different take on the evil that kind of got away from what the Amityville movies were about.

The other major difference was within the family dynamic. Many of the Amityville movies were centered around broken families or blended families. George Lutz was a stepdad. Amityville 3-D had a divorced family. There were single fathers and single mothers. The Amityville Haunting was just a family. No step-family. No divorce. A mom, a dad, and their three biological children. Nobody in the family was possessed by the evil. Douglas grew paranoid as the days went on, but he never became abusive toward his family beyond the amount he already was. He thought someone was sneaking into or out of the house, so he installed security cameras. When they showed doors opening and closing on their own, he started looking into supernatural books. His family was worried about him, but he was obsessed with the supernatural and figuring out how to stop what was happening. This was different than the fathers in other Amityville movies who would turn evil and threaten their families. It was always the whole family versus the evil.

There’s not too much more to say about The Amityville Haunting. It was fine. If it weren’t attached to the Amityville name, it would be a completely passable horror movie. Maybe even one of the better horror movies from The Asylum. With the Amityville name attached to it, however, it felt like a quick cash grab that never really cared about being an Amityville movie. It just cared about making money. And, I guess, that’s probably what I’m getting into now. I’m going to be seeing a lot more of these quick cash grabs as I keep watching Amityville movies.

Going forward, the Amityville movies get into a lot of standalone stories where people took the Amityville name and did whatever they wanted with it. Sure, that was what happened in the original run of movies. They weren’t all about what happened in the house. There were lamps, clocks, mirrors, and dollhouses that allowed the haunting to happen elsewhere. There was even a movie that felt completely unrelated to the hauntings at 112 Ocean Avenue.

But the movies that followed The Amityville Haunting were on another level. There was no Hollywood backing. Well, there was some at some point. Many of the movies, however, were independently made. If someone had an idea for a horror movie, and they could somehow relate it to Amityville, they would. Nobody was going to stop them. The murders that many movies referenced were real. They happened. Filmmakers could reference them if they wanted to. Would they take liberties? Yeah. Would they expand upon the lore surrounding the murders? Of course. And nobody was going to get in the way of their Amityville movies.

Things are going to get a little wackier and a little more boring moving forward. The post-remake Amityville movies took a lot of swings with their story elements. Many of them came up short on the execution, though. You’ll see what I mean. Trust me. You’ll see.

You’ll also see these notes:

• Jimmy Bennet made his third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Amityville Horror. He was also in Movie 43 (week 243) and Snow Buddies (week 270).
• Rachel Nichols played the babysitter in The Amityville Horror. She previously appeared in Alex Cross (week 12) and Breach (week 494).
• Jon Kondelik is a regular for The Asylum. He has shown up in Rise of the Zombies (week 16), Nazis at the Center of the Earth (week 73), and The Amityville Haunting.
• Chloë Grace Moretz was in Movie 43 (week 243) and The Amityville Horror.
• Danny McCarthy has appeared in both The Amityville Horror and Fred Claus (week 265).
• Rich Komenich from EZ Money (week 305) was in The Amityville Horror.
• Solarbabies (week 416) featured Jimmy Star, who was also in The Amityville Horror.
• Jesse James played one of the kids in The Amityville Horror. He was in Jumper (week 452).
• Finishing off The Amityville Horror was Philip Baker Hall from Bending the Rules (week 478).
• Amy Van Horne returned from Transmorphers: Fall of Man (week 130) for The Amityville Haunting.
• The Amityville Haunting featured Mary LeGault from Chicks Dig Gay Guys (week 145).
• Courtney Rice was in The Amityville Haunting and The Human Centipede III (week 180).
• Finally, Luke Barnett appeared in The Amityville Haunting and Attila (week 321).
• Have you seen the remake of The Amityville Horror? Have you seen The Amityville Haunting? What did you think about them? Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter to let me know your thoughts.
• If there are any movies that you think would make good subjects for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me all about them. Tag me on Twitter. Leave a comment. Suggest some movies for me.
• Make sure to visit Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• I’m still working my way through these posts, so you know the next one will be more Amityville movies. Which ones, though? I’ll be checking out the next three on my list: The Amityville Asylum, The Amityville Theater, and Amityville Death House. I’ll also make mention of Amityville: Vanishing Point, a movie I wasn’t able to check out. Come back soon for that post.

Amityille: It's About Time (1992), Amityville: A New Generation (1993), and Amityville Dollhouse (1996)

I am now five movies into the Amityville franchise and things have changed a lot since I started. Not for me. It hasn’t been that long since I began this journey. For the movies. The first three movies were based on some form of reality. They were about people who were associated with 112 Ocean Avenue in one way or another. Their names may have been changed in the sequels, but real people inspired the stories being told. They were also theatrically released at that point.

When it came time for a fourth Amityville movie, theatrical release was no longer an option for the franchise. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes was a television movie and The Amityville Curse was direct-to-video. Neither movie was based on real people. The fourth film was an original story about one of the Amityville demons taking control of a lamp and being shipped to California, while the fifth film wasn’t connected to 112 Ocean Avenue at all. The series was branching out into fully fictional tales.

Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes was an interesting insight into where the series would go. It was one of the weaker entries, especially in that original run, but it hinted at things to come. The lamp was a terrible “personification” of the evil. It was a lamp so ugly that I couldn’t believe anyone would actually want it. More importantly, there was nothing about the lamp that made it any different than the evil that audiences had grown accustomed to throughout the franchise. It placed the evil in an object without building on that, simply to allow the evil to go elsewhere.

The three movies that I’ll be covering in this post could be seen as the continuation of this idea, though each of them did it much better. Some people refer to this section of the Amityville saga as the “cursed object” movies. That makes complete sense. Each of the movies featured an object that was either evil or influenced by the evil. The difference between these and the aforementioned lamp was that these objects allowed the evil to mess with people in new and interesting ways. The first of the cursed objects was utilized in…

Amityville: It’s About Time

Okay, so I’m not going to bury the lede here. This was my favourite of the franchise so far. I liked it more than the first and second films, which are typically seen as the best. And I might agree that they are better made movies. Well, the first one, at least. I just had a better time with the sixth entry. So I’m going into this part of the post a little hyped up about what I saw.

Amityville: It’s About Time was as accurate as a title could be when it came to what the movie was about. The Amityville haunting continued, only, this time, the paranormal entity could manipulate time. It was an Amityville movie about time manipulation. That’s a pretty accurate title. Jacob Sterling (Stephen Macht) returned home from a business trip in Amityville. He was an architect building a new subdivision. He came home with a clock, taken directly from 112 Ocean Avenue. His son, Rusty (Damon Martin), and ex-girlfriend, Andrea (Shawn Weatherly), soon noticed strange things. Time seemed to slow down or speed up. People began acting differently. They had to figure out what was causing the trouble and how to get rid of it before it was too late.

The clock caused all the problems. When I wrote about Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, I complained about the possessed lamp being a dumb villain. I don’t feel that way about the clock in Amityville: It’s About Time. Let me explain why. Amityville: The Evil Escapes was essentially your average Amityville movie. There were a bunch of people being harassed by the same evil force that was in the Amityville house. The only differences were a change of house and that the evil force was personified in a lamp that nobody would want. Otherwise, the villain was the same as before. Amityville: It’s About Time changed things up enough that it felt fresh. First, the clock wasn’t as atrocious as the lamp. Would I want it in my house? Maybe not. But I could much more easily see it in someone’s house. The force in the clock also played with time, making it something different than what came before. It wasn’t simply the evil force put into an object. It was an evil force put into an object with different abilities than the evil force from before.

There were a few ways that the clock was able to manipulate time. The first was when Rusty went downstairs for a late-night snack. Rusty walked past the room where the clock was, and he saw something strange. He backtracked. When he threw on the light, the room transformed into what looked like either a dungeon or a medieval smithy. He threw the light off and back on and it was the normal room. Off and on and it was back to the medieval room. The clock was changing the Rusty’s perception of time within his own home. It would later torment Dr. Leonard Stafford (Jonathan Penner), Andrea’s new boyfriend. He put a snack in the microwave late one night. Twenty seconds. As the time wound down, it got slower and slower and slower, until it eventually stopped altogether. During the time stoppage, Leonard saw things that the demonic presence wanted him to see, and started freaking out. Then time started up again, everything went back to normal, and the microwave finished. It was using a different means to torment people, all through manipulating time.

The last thing I need to bring up about Amityville: It’s About Time was how it had the Rube Goldberg sort of death that Final Destination popularized less than a decade later. Rusty confided in one of the neighbours about the supernatural happenings. She believed him and tried to help him conquer the evil. The evil put and end to that by ending the neighbour’s life. As she went for a walk, her cane got stuck in a crack in the road. A diaper truck that was parked down the street began rolling toward her. She tried to get the cane out but couldn’t. She left it behind. The woman ran onto the lawn, the truck swerved, and she dove behind a pillar. The truck hit the pillar and stopped. She lay on the ground and stared up at it in shock and disbelief. A stork figure on the top of the truck began to rock back and forth. Before she could get up, the figure fell and impaled her, causing her to bleed out and die. It very much reminded me of the style of death throughout the Final Destination franchise, only almost a decade before those films.

So far, Amityville: It’s About Time has been my favourite of the franchise. It continued the franchise in a way that helped it grow, while still feeling like it fit with the other films. The entity had a similar effect on Jacob Sterling in this film as it did on George Lutz. But it also manipulated time, which was new for the franchise. The house had a face, much like the original Amityville home. But it was updated to some modern, 80s-ish architecture, allowing the franchise to feel more modern. All in all, it was a good step forward for a franchise which was growing stagnant.

Amityville: A New Generation

Okay, so like any Amityville sequel, this one kind of took the lore that had built up and scrapped it. They’re basically all just standalone films that reference the “real” events that happened. They don’t reference the movies that came before them. This one went back to the source of all the terror through the Amityville franchise. It went back to before the DeFeo murders. It was a sequel to a prequel that didn’t exist and wasn’t mentioned until this point.

Amityville: A New Generation was about Keyes Terry (Ross Partridge), a photographer who was given a mirror by a homeless man near his home. The mirror happened to be a possessed mirror from the Amityville house that had been present when Franklin Bronner (Jack Orend) killed his parents and siblings during Thanksgiving dinner in 1966. Keyes soon discovered that the mirror was possessed by whatever evil had captured Franklin’s mind, and the mirror started killing Keyes’s friends. Detective Clark (Terry O’Quinn) investigated the new murders. Through the detective, Keyes’s learned that Franklin was actually his dad.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Well, not really. But I didn’t do the best job describing it. Let’s just say that Keyes’s father, Franklin Bronner, was a murderer. He had been possessed by an evil mirror. He was locked up for many years, out of Keyes’s life. Keyes forgot all about him. In the present day, he found an unknowing Keyes and gifted him that same mirror. Now Keyes’s friends were being killed by the mirror. Or, better yet, the mirror was possessing the friends to kill each other and themselves. Is that any clearer? Not really? I don’t know how to make it much clearer. You have all the clues.

There were some really good things in Amityville: A New Generation. While it was a basic demonic force changing people’s personalities and mentally tormenting them, it went about it in a slightly different way. It possessed people, through the mirror, to attack and/or kill other people and themselves. The force wasn’t using people as a simple vessel to physically act out its violent desires. It got them to commit the same violence on themselves to tie up loose ends. That was why Keyes’s friend Suki hanged herself in her art studio. She was a loose end after the force took control of her. She had to go as much as anyone it targeted. This need to tie up loose ends gave the evil force more depth than simply being evil chaos.

The other good quality of Amityville: A New Generation was the family connection. It really was a new generation. Keyes was the son of a man who murdered his family during Thanksgiving dinner. His father had been possessed by the force in the mirror. Now Keyes had the mirror and the force was coming for him. He spent the movie in fear that he would become like his father, as if the evil was inside him and was hereditary. Looking in the mirror, he saw himself, but also saw his father. Was his father inside him? He questioned whether the possession of the mirror was real, or whether he was going insane. This could have been better played had the movie been its own thing, without so many Amityville entries letting the audience know that the evil force was real. It would have been fun to be along with Keyes for the ride as he questioned his sanity. That’s not to say it was a bad ride. It was still fun, regardless of the perspective it gave.

One other quick thing I want to bring up, and something that is completely unrelated to the quality of Amityville: A New Generation, is that the exterior for Keyes’s apartment was the same exterior that would later be used for Paddy’s Pub in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That marks the second time I’ve recognized a home in the franchise for something outside the franchise. The first was in Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, when the interior of the house was the same house used in 8213: Gacy House, the final segment of V/H/S, and the music video for Awolnation’s Sail. So that’s fun.

Amityville: A New Generation was a fun addition to the Amityville franchise. It wasn’t the scariest entry and wasn’t my favourite, but I still had a good time with it. It tried some stuff with the familial relation that brought a new layer to the proceedings. It tried something a little different, which gave some life into what could have otherwise been another standard “person gets cursed object” entry. We’ll see if the franchise can keep that up with the final entry before the remake.

Amityville Dollhouse

Yeah, it kept that up. Amityville Dollhouse took the Amityville concept to some new places, thanks to a dollhouse, while also staying true to the Amityville roots. The haunting was still there. The force was still toying with people’s mental states, changing them negatively. There was still a family, there was still a house with the windows for eyes, and there was still a fiery explosion sort of deal at the end. It was very much like any of the classic Amityville flicks. But the dollhouse allowed for something new to come into the picture.

At this point, eight movies into a franchise about a haunted house, it’s kind of surprising to have these new layers successfully introduced. It didn’t feel like Amityville Dollhouse had gone off the rails. Bill (Robin Thomas) and Claire (Starr Andreeff) were newly married and moved with their children Todd (Allen Cutler), Jessica (Rachel Duncan), and Jimmy (Jarrett Lennon) into a new home. Jessica’s birthday was coming up. Bill couldn’t figure out the right gift for her but found a dollhouse in the shed out back. The dollhouse ended up being a source of terror, bringing an evil force into the house. A house that happened to maybe be built on the site of the original Amityville home.

Let me start by describing the Martin family. Bill and Claire had just gotten married. They had kids from previous relationships. Todd and Jessica were Bill’s kids, while Jimmy was Claire’s son. For some reason, they all shared a last name. It didn’t make much sense because they family had recently come together. Whatever. I can overlook that. What I really need to point out is how this final entry in the original series brought things full circle. It wasn’t the Lutz family returning to the house. Instead, it was another blended family. A mom, a dad, two sons, and a daughter. Much like the Lutz family, all the kids took on the name of someone who their mother married well after they were born. Odd thing to do. The daughter ended up being the closest to the evil force, much like Amy Lutz was friends with Jody. There was even a father trying to kill the rest of the family, only it was Jimmy’s dad (Clayton Murray), back from the dead, as opposed to Bill, the patriarch of the family. Many of the familial elements were borrowed from the first film.

As for what Amityville Dollhouse brought in terms of new stuff, it had to do with a connection between the house and the dollhouse. The house was implied to be built on the ground where the original Amityville home had been destroyed. This may have put it within continuity with Amityville 3-D, though this is an Amityville movie, so who knows? There was no explanation for where the dollhouse came from, though its resemblance to the original house for sure linked it to the evil that had haunted so many. The connection between house and dollhouse was more than the surface looks. In one scene, Jimmy’s pet mouse ran into the dollhouse and hid under a bed. That caused a giant mouse to be under Jessica’s bed, showing that what happened in the dollhouse could happen in the larger house. Later in the movie, Bill dove through the fireplace and ended up in an alternate universe, which was seemingly the attic of the dollhouse. The dollhouse was the center of the disturbances happening in their house and through defeating what was in the dollhouse, they were able to flee their home and the evil.

The final new aspect to the Amityville franchise was a physical representation of the evil. Sure, people had been possessed in previous movies. Yeah, there was a demon in Amityville 3-D. This was a little different. There were insect-like creatures sprouting from dolls that were in the dollhouse. One of the dolls was investigated by Tobias (Franc Ross) and Marla (Lenore Kasdorf), aunt and uncle to the kids. They realized that the dolls were hosts to small demonic beings, which Tobias confronted with Bill after jumping through the fireplace and into what seemed like the attic of the dollhouse. The evil had rarely been given a distinct look beyond a seemingly inanimate object. It was a change to have that happen in Amityville Dollhouse, and only helped to make the movie stand out.

Three movies. Three different cursed objects haunting people. Three different ways that the evil manipulated people. The Amityville movies were swinging for the fences and, I would say, succeeding. They were three solid horror movies. And they didn’t feel like direct-to-video entries, even though they all were. It’s a shame that they didn’t put out a couple more of these before the reboot. What can you do, though? The past is the past. It is what it is.

There was a nine-year break between the release of Amityville Dollhouse in 1996 and The Amityville Horror in 2005. That meant that for almost nine years, there were no Amityville movies. There were none in the theater. None on television. None that went direct-to-video. New ones, I mean. I’m sure the original eight were being shown on cable networks and people were watching them at home. This kind of break was rare for the franchise. It definitely won’t be happening again any time soon. There are a handful of Amityville movies every year, now.

Things were about to change for the franchise. They were about to change quickly. The remake of The Amityville Horror in 2005 would signal that change, a change that I’ll get into in much more depth come the next post. The one, continuous (albeit, mostly standalone movies) series came to an end with Amityville Dollhouse. Things were going to be reset, and then explode. Kind of like an Amityville house.

Here are a few notes to wrap things up:

• Amityville: A New Generation was directed by John Murlowski, who also directed Santa with Muscles (week 211).
• Stephen Macht starred in Amityville: It’s About Time. He was previously featured in Galaxina (week 432) and Atlas Shrugged:Part II (week 490).
• Jonathan Penner was featured in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85) before Amityville: It’s About Time.
• Willie C. Carpenter has been featured in two Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood (week 120) and Amityville: It’s About Time.
• Megan Ward was in Amityville: It’s About Time and Freaked (week 131).
• Dean Cochran returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Amityville: It’s About Time, after first appearing in Batman and Robin (week 138).
• The great Dick Miller was in both Amityville: It’s About Time and Chopping Mall (week 306).
• Finishing off Amityville: It’s About Time was Shawn Weatherly from Police Academy 3: Back in Training (week 400).
• Robert Harvey made his fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Amityville: A New Generation. His other appearances were in Jack and Jill (week 101), Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (week 221), and Sandy Wexler (week 231).
• The great Richard Roundtree was in Amityville: A New Generation, as well as Steel (week 127), Theodore Rex (week 223), and Maniac Cop (week 480).
• Lin Shaye had a bit role in Amityville: A New Generation. She was also in Surf School (week 42), Big Ass Spider! (week 61), and Say It Isn’t So (week 481).
• Robert Hammond became a Sunday “Bad” Movies three-timer with Amityville: A New Generation. He was previously seen in Captain America (week 181) and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (week 350).
• Karl Johnson was in Laser Mission (week 139) and Amityville: A New Generation.
• Finally, Amityville: A New Generation featured Bob Jennings from Road House (week 200).
• Have you seen Amityville: It’s About Time? Have you seen Amityville: A New Generation? Have you seen Amityville Dollhouse? What did you think of them? You can share your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments.
• You can also find me on Twitter or in the comments if there are any movies you think would make a good fit for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m open to suggestions.
• There’s more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun to be had on Instagram. Check it out.
• I’m guessing you already know what the next post will be. I watched more Amityville movies. I wrote about them. Which ones, though? The next post will be about the remake of The Amityville Horror, and then I’ll be tackling The Amityville Haunting. If those sound interesting to you, make sure to check out the post when it goes up soon.

Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (1989), The Amityville Curse (1990)

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 Rubeš) 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 13^th 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.