A priest performs an exorcism at the Amityville Horror house. When he realizes he can’t destroy the evil, he banishes it “away from the Earth”, which causes the house to uproot itself and fly off into outer space. Prospective filmmakers take note: THIS is how you start a movie!
A thousand years later, a spaceship stumbles upon the house floating in space. The crew boards the ship and find the priest who performed the exorcism centuries ago still alive. They bring him aboard their ship, but the evil entity that possessed the house also sneaks on board and begins to play mind games with the crew.
Amityville in Space is proof that the spirit of Ed Wood is alive and well. Writer/director Mark (Amityville Island) Polonia didn’t have a dime to make this movie with, but he made it anyway, and some of his… shall we say… “inspired” methods of creating futuristic art direction are downright hilarious. For example, the walls of the spaceship are nothing more than trash bags that have been spraypainted with glitter. Also, the “cyborg” wears a costume that looks like it came directly from the Halloween clearance rack at Kmart. The dialogue is rather choice too. When the crew finds a Satanic pentagram floating in space, one astronaut quips, “I almost got a tattoo of that!”
Essentially, Amityville in Space is like a no-budget riff on Event Horizon, which was already kind of like a haunted house movie in space. The opening strikes the right balance of tongue in cheek camp and outright goofiness. However, things are noticeably less successful whenever Polonia tries to play it straight. While he wrings as much from the premise as he can with the limited means available to him, the fun does dry up around the halfway mark.
Although this was leagues better than I expected, I still can’t quite recommend it. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the villain, whose voice is so overly synthesized it’s hard to make out what he’s saying half the time. (He sounds like Darth Vader speaking in slow motion.) On the plus side, the final monster is quite hilarious looking. After sitting through Polonia’s Amityville Island and Amityville Exorcism, I never would’ve guessed he could’ve made a movie called Amityville in Space this almost-but-not-quite worthwhile. Hats off to him for proving me wrong.
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