SCREAM AND STREAM AGAIN: AMITYVILLE DOLLHOUSE (1997) ** ½

(Streamed via The Archive)

A blended family moves into a new home.  They find a dollhouse replica of the Amityville Horror house sitting in their garage and stupidly put it in their little girl’s room.  It isn’t long before a bunch of wacky supernatural shit goes down.  Eventually, the family’s psychic aunt and biker occult expert uncle must step in to put a stop to the otherworldly antics.

Amityville Dollhouse was the eighth and final entry in the original Amityville Horror series before the franchise was rebooted by Michael Bay eight years later.  It’s an often perplexing but moderately entertaining mishmash of half-baked elements, clunky set pieces, and WTF logic.  Screenwriter Joshua Michael Stern (who went on to direct Jobs) must’ve been sitting at his typewriter like a deranged cook who keeps adding more and more ingredients to a meal and then forgets to turn on the oven.  It’s never boring, so there’s that.

It’s all over the place, and it’s sometimes just plain stupid, but it’s hard to completely hate any movie that contains:  A zombie dad, a giant rat, a biker who runs an occult bookstore, a spider in a piñata, nightmarish visions, voodoo dolls that come to life, a pair of killer headphones, magic spells that look suspiciously like they were stolen from a Vegas light show, rubbery demons, and dialogue like, “Hey, maggot-brain!  You’re history!”

Other than the fact that the dollhouse is a replica of the original house, there really isn’t any connective tissue with the other films in the Amityville Horror series.  I guess the subplot where the sexy stepmom (Ghoulies 2’s Starr Andreeff) becomes possessed and gets the hots for her stepson is kind of like a callback to the incest stuff in Part 2.  It’s weird and icky, but, once it’s introduced it’s almost immediately forgotten.  Just like everything else in the movie.

Sure, you have to sit through a lot of After School Special crap with the stepsiblings that don’t get along.  Of course, the precocious little brother character will grate on your nerves every time he opens his damned mouth.  However, once the supernatural shit hits the fan, it’s mostly agreeable dumb fun.   

I mean how many movies have you seen where the sexy girlfriend’s topless sex scene is interrupted by a zombie hornet?  This could be the only cinematic instance of such a phenomenon on record.  Later, the same babe gets too close to the fireplace and goes up like a Buddhist monk.  Talk about a hot date. 

Speaking of burning up, get a load of those long lingering shots of the burning house at the end.  They go on so long that it becomes painfully obvious we’re watching nothing more than a terrible model being set on fire.  Heck, it looks even faker than the dollhouse itself!  They should’ve just filmed the dollhouse burning.  It would’ve been more believable. 

The dialogue is pretty choice throughout, but it’s the wisecracking zombie dad who gets the best line of the movie when he says, “Don’t worry, it only hurts… FOREVER!”