The Last Amityville Movie? Well, we can hope.
A horror YouTuber (writer/director Josh Spiegel) releases a video about the latest Amityville movie, Amityville Zoo. While his family is out of town, he stays at home making content. Shortly after someone anonymously sends him a doorknob from the Amityville Horror house, weird things start happening. He soon finds out that the doorknob carries the Amityville curse and the only way to lift it is to… make an Amityville movie.
After being pleasantly surprised by the meta spoof Amityville Ripper, I figured I’d give another Amityville movie a shot. I wasn’t expecting that this too would take the meta approach. The early scenes of our hero talking about Amityville rip-offs are amusing. It’s just that once he finds himself in one, the fun quickly dissipates.
The biggest debit is that much of the film is set in the found footage mold as the story is told through a series of YouTube videos, Zoom calls, and Ring doorbell footage. It’s essentially Paranormal Activity but with less money and a smaller cast. The main character isn’t annoying or anything, but he’s not strong enough of a personality to sustain an entire feature, especially when long stretches of the movie are devoted to him all by his lonesome doing long monologues into the camera. It also doesn’t help that most of the movie revolves around him investigating strange noises. An hour or so of this may have been tolerable. At ninety-five minutes, it just feels like a slog.
Unlike most haunted house movies, this one at least has a plausible reason why our main character doesn’t just leave the house. (There’s another pandemic going on.) I also found it amusing how the film’s lone bit of nudity winds up inadvertently getting censored. However, fun bits like this are more of an exception than the rule. The CGI deaths are pretty crappy, and the ending is weak too. Still, as far as fake Amityville movies go, you could do so much worse.
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