The clown painting that showed up at the finale of Amityville Toybox finds its way into the home of an unsuspecting family. During a birthday party, dear old dad dresses up like a clown and slaughters his family with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself. Later, some enterprising thieves break into the house and try to steal the painting with the intention of selling it on the dark web. Naturally, they are killed by the ghost of the clown.
This is a solid set-up for a fake Amityville flick. Unfortunately, it goes off the rails soon after. If you’re watching it to see the killer clown on the thumbnail picture, you’re going to be severely disappointed as the killer clown plot is immediately dropped about fifteen minutes into the movie. From there, it’s a straight sequel to Amityville Toybox with the killer wind-up monkey terrorizing another family.
Another guy buys the possessed toy monkey at an antique toy shop run by Mark (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge) Patton. He brings it home and immediately starts having nightmares. Before long, he’s berating and beating his poor wife and picking up and killing hookers.
Amityville Clownhouse suffers from a lot of padding, including unnecessary news reports, a ten-minute recap of Amityville Toybox, extremely slow-moving opening and closing credits sequences, and a long scene where someone fondles the monkey. (At least they didn’t spank it.) The film also has a weird sound mix where incidental music and sound effects drown out the dialogue in some scenes. The finale is underwhelming, to say the least.
It's not all bad though. I liked the homage to the Amityville 3-D poster (which also turned up in Amityville in the Hood), and the gore (which includes a jack-in-the-box that rips someone’s eyes out) is decent. Patton gives a fun, tweaked performance too, but it’s not nearly enough to save this slow-moving slog.
AKA: Amityville: Evil Never Dies.
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