Lisa (Sophia Del Pizzo) gets a job as a janitor on the night shift at a creepy mental institution. Almost immediately, she starts seeing ghosts of little girls and dead patients walking the hallways. Naturally, no one believes her. It doesn’t help matters when one of the inmates is allegedly a witch (Eileen Daly from Razor Blade Smile and the face of Redemption Films) who knows all of Lisa’s dirty secrets. Things eventually come to a head when Lisa learns the asylum has been built on the former grounds of the old Amityville Horror house.
The Amityville Asylum is a competent but generic thriller. It’s watchable, but it never really grabs you. It goes through all the motions and checks all the obvious boxes, and yet, somehow, it remains tepid and forgettable. I guess the big problem with it is the sluggish pacing. That, and the fact that nothing much ever really happens, and when it finally does, it’s not particularly graphic or effective.
The film is anchored by a solid lead performance by Del Pizzo. She’s particularly good during the early scenes where she’s given the grand tour of the asylum, learns the ropes of working there, and discovers the creepy “Ward X” where all the dangerous inmates are housed. However, Del Pizzo’s efforts just can’t carry the film through its draggy passages. It also doesn’t help that everything that happens in the last twenty minutes is predictable and ho-hum. The denouement goes on way too long too.
This is another one of those movies where the soundtrack gets overbearing at times and drowns out the dialogue. Most of the time when this happens, it occurs when characters are talking about the real-life events in Amityville, which makes me wonder if it was done on purpose. Like, the filmmakers were afraid they were gonna get sued if the dialogue hewed too close to the old movies and/or events. Either way, it’s kind of annoying.
Oh, and this is another one of those fake Amityville movies, like Amityville Theater in which the phrase, “Six must die!” is heard.
AKA: Amityville: Asylum. AKA: The Nesting 2: Amityville Asylum.
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