TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE CURSE (1990) **

Okay, folks.  Here we are.  The last movie in our Amityville April series.  This is the fifth in the franchise, and the only one of the “official” entries I haven’t seen.  Because of that, I saved it for last.  I thought I may enjoy it more after watching so many of the no-budget unrelated Amityville rip-offs.  As it turned out, that wasn’t the case.  It’s not terrible or anything, but it’s awfully dull and slow moving.  If I’m being completely honest, it’s probably the weakest of the official Amityville films.

A group of friends pool their money together and buy a house in Amityville (not THE house, just A house) with the intent of fixing it up and flipping it for a profit.  As you can probably guess, this house is haunted too.  It seems a priest was murdered in a confessional booth twelve years earlier.  The booth was then stored in the house’s basement and voila!  The place is haunted AF.

Throughout the film we get a dog attack, a spider attack, and lame psychic visions.  Most of the boring home repair scenes play like This Old House though.  Oh, and one annoying guy films everything with his home movie camera, which set an unfortunate precedent for the series.  

Journeyman character actor Kim (The Last Boy Scout) Coates takes the acting honors as the nervous, bespectacled, chain-smoking guy who eventually snaps and starts killing his friends.  Casting him as a psycho in an Amityville sequel was a good idea, but unfortunately, he’s kept on a tight leash for most of the running time.  When he finally does get to strut his stuff, the movie does show signs of life.  The ending, where he winds up with a burnt Freddy Krueger face and chases a lady around the house who defends herself with a nail gun, is decent.  It’s just one of those too little, too late scenarios as the bulk of the film is just too plodding for its own good.  Cassandra Gava (the hot witch from Conan the Barbarian) is pretty good as Coates’ sexy wife.  However, the rest of the cast are comprised of irritating psychics, gossiping old biddies, and insufferable assholes.  

Well, now that I’ve finally waded through all the official Amityville movies and a LOT of the unofficial ones, here is how I stack them up:  

THE OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL AMITYVILLE HORROR SERIES RANKING:  

1. Amityville:  The Awakening ***

2. The Amityville Horror (2005) ***

3. Amityville Witches ***

4. The Amityville Terror ***

5. Amityville 3-D ** ½ 

6. The Amityville Horror (1979) ** ½ 

7. Amityville Dollhouse ** ½ 

8. Amityville:  The Final Chapter ** ½ 

9. Amityville in Space ** ½ 

10. Amityville Toybox ** ½ 

11. Amityville Christmas Vacation ** ½ 

12. The Amityville Moon ** ½ 

13. Amityville 2:  The Possession **

14. Amityville Horror:  The Evil Escapes **

15. Amityville 1992:  It’s About Time **

16. Amityville Death House **

17. Amityville Exorcism **

18. The Amityville Asylum **

19. Amityville Cop **

20. The Amityville Harvest **

21. Amityville:  A New Generation **

22. Amityville Uprising **

23. The Amityville Curse **

24. The Amityville Haunting **

25. Ghosts of Amityville **

26. An Amityville Poltergeist **

27. Amityville Clownhouse * ½ 

28. Amityville in the Hood * ½ 

29. Amityville:  No Escape * ½ 

30. Amityville Scarecrow 2 *

31. Amityville Karen *

32. Amityville Theater *

33. Amityville Island ½ *

34. Amityville Hex ½ *

35. Mt. Misery Rd. ½ *

TUBI CONTINUED… GHOSTS OF AMITYVILLE (2022) **

Olivia (Junie Liv Thomasson) is a little girl who is still grieving the sudden loss of her mother.  Hoping for a fresh start, her father (Jonas Thomasson) moves them into a creepy new house in Amityville.  When he is unexpectedly called into work, he is forced to leave Olivia home alone. Before long, she begins seeing a creepy clown who pops up when he’s least expected and terrorizes her wherever she goes.  

Things kick off with a not-bad opening title sequence full of vintage creepy clown footage.  The first act, in which our pint-sized heroine is stalked by the supernatural clown killer, is rather decent too.  There is some genuine tension in these early scenes, and I give director JT Kris credit for adequately conveying the anxiety a child feels when left home alone.  Thomasson also does a fine job as the child in peril and carries the film about as far as anyone could’ve, given the circumstances.  

Unfortunately, once it is revealed that the first act has all been a (SPOILER) dream, it takes a lot of wind out of the movie’s sails.  To make matters worse, the script keeps playing the same “It’s All a Dream” card over and over again.  Every time it’s revealed that what we’ve just seen has been a dream… AGAIN, it just gets more and more tiresome.  Before long, the film becomes an endurance test of the audience’s patience.  (This also happens to be one of those fake Amityville flicks where everyone talks with the thickest brogues you ever heard.)  

Even at a relatively scant seventy-four minutes, it still feels bloated and overlong.  When the movie should be over, it isn’t.  When it finally does decide to end, it’s at the most arbitrary spot imaginable.  It’s a shame too because the first act could’ve been a solid self-contained short film.  Had the rest of the picture been as strong, Ghosts of Amityville had a ghost of a chance being worthwhile.  As it is, this ghost is rather busted.

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE TERROR (2016) ***

The Amityville Terror is one of the best Amityville rip-offs of all time.  (I still think Amityville Witches is my favorite fake Amityville flick though.)  I’m not quite sure if it was “good, actually” or if it only looked like a minor masterpiece because I had just got done sitting through Amityville Hex and Mt. Misery Rd. back-to-back.  Whatever the case may be, it’s a surprisingly solid little chiller.  Heck, it’s even better than most of the “official” films in the Amityville franchise.

This is about as good of a fake Amityville movie as you could hope for.  It even feels like an official sequel since it takes place in the same house as Part 4.  It also helps that the characters are likeable and resemble actual human beings rather than standard cardboard cutout horror movie cliches.  

Todd (Kaiwi Lyman), his wife Jessica (Kim Nielsen), and their daughter Hailey (Nicole Tompkins) move in with his ex-junkie sister Shae (Amanda Barton) shortly after she buys a new house.  Once everyone is settled in, Shae starts having massive freak-outs, which makes Hailey suspect Auntie is back on the horse again.  Really, the house has possessed her, which explains her increasingly erratic behavior.  To make matters worse, the townsfolk are conspiring against the family because they know the only way to keep the evil at bay is to periodically “feed” the house new victims.  

The film continues the official Amityville series tradition of having an incest subplot (which goes all the way back to Part 2) as well as using ideas from some of the unofficial entries (like the town conspiracy subplot that is similar to Amityville Theater).  What elevates The Amityville Terror above the usual dreck is the concentration of strong female characters.  Barton has a great bathroom freakout scene and looks great while walking around in skimpy outfits and/or nude.  Tompkins is excellent too as the dirt bike-riding, crossbow-carrying rebellious teenager.  Tonya Kay is also a lot of fun as the sexy property manager who likes to come to the house unannounced while wearing a leather dominatrix get-up to collect the rent check.  In addition to have a memorable sex scene with a clueless busboy, she also gets the best line of the movie when she says, “It’s like Vegas, baby!  Never bet against the house!”  

TUBI CONTINUED… MT. MISERY RD. (2018) ½ *

Okay, so I know this is supposed to be “Amityville April” and all, so why am I watching a movie called “Mt. Misery Rd.”?  Well, it’s listed on Tubi (and on IMDb) as “Amityville:  Mt. Misery Rd.”, but the actual onscreen title is just “Mt. Misery Rd.”  Actually, there is no onscreen title.  The camera just lingers on a road sign that says “Mt. Misery Rd.” for what feels like an eternity.  

Boy, “Misery” is the word for it, let me tell you.

Let’s start off with the fact that it doesn’t even take place in Amityville.  While it does take place in Long Island, where Amityville is located, the action occurs on the titular road.  According to the “movie”, it’s “one of the most haunted roads in the world”.  

If you’re wondering why I put “movie” in quotation marks, it’s because to call this thing a movie is to use the very loosest definition of the word.  What it resembles most is someone’s vacation videos being passed off as a fake Amityville flick.  In fact, I think that’s exactly what happened.  

You see, the “movie” was directed by a husband-and-wife duo named Chuck and Karolina Morrongiello.  They also star as a married couple called Charlie and Buzi (pronounced “Bougie”).  All they do is film each other flying from Florida to Long Island so they can check out the supposedly haunted road.  People tell them to stay away from the road, and naturally, they don’t listen, and sub-sub-sub-Blair Witch shenanigans ensue.  

Many (wrong) people have called Ed Wood the worst director of all time.  That is because they have never witnessed a Chuck and Karolina Morrongiello picture.  Wood is positively Hitchcockian compared to this duo.  Let me just clue you in on how bad they are.  Okay, so we’ve seen countless boom mike shadows in movies before, right?  Well, Mt. Misery Rd. just might contain the first selfie stick shadow in screen history.  

Half of the time Charlie holds the camera and films Buzi.  Then, they switch.  I know they were working with a crew of one, but man, is this ever bad.  

Along the way, the duo manages to break every single rule in the director’s handbook.  Multiple jump cuts occur within a single dialogue scene.  Many scenes end with random zooms to nothing in particular.  The “Ken Burns” effect is left on for some of the dialogue scenes.  Actors constantly flub lines.  The list is endless.

Speaking of “acting” (again, notice the quotation marks), Karolina is some kind of thespian.  Her accent is so thick you can’t tell what the hell she says half the time.  She LOOKS great, but an actress she is not.

With the awkward love scenes and awful accents, Mt. Misery Rd. sometimes feels like the Found Footage version of The Room.  Then again, that would give it too much credit, as 99% of this is unwatchable dreck.  

However--that other 1% is one of the most phenomenally spectacular displays of WTF insanity in screen history.  In fact, it’s almost worth watching Mt. Misery Rd. just for this one sequence.  Or, if you’re… you know, smart, you can just fast-forward to the scene, watch it, and forget the rest.

Said scene takes place in a dive bar.  Charlie and Buzi belly up to the bar and then, from out of nowhere, she begins to shake her booty uncontrollably for like five minutes to a country song called “Shake Your Booty”, which only has like, three lyrics, which are “Shake”, “Your”, and “Booty”.  Folks, I have seen some shit and I have seen some shit.  That shit has nothing on this shit.  I almost want to give the “movie” Four Stars just for this sequence alone.  Then again, I may be having psychological repercussions from watching nothing but fake Amityville movies for an entire month, so I may be in desperate need of medical intervention.  Send help.  Or shake your booty.  Whichever comes first.

  

AKA:  Amityville:  Mt. Misery Rd.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE HEX (2021) ½ *

Amityville Hex is kind of like the fake Amityville version of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.  Various YouTubers, podcasters, vloggers, and internet personalities receive a challenge to recite “The Amityville Hex”, a spell that supposedly dooms whoever speaks it out loud.  Naturally, these yutzes stare directly into the camera and read it.  Soon after, they begin having nightmares, start slowly losing their marbles, and then die and/or kill someone else.  

Honestly, they should’ve just called it The Amityville Tide Pod Challenge.  

If there’s anything I hate more than Found Footage horror movies, it’s Live-Streaming horror movies.  I know filmmakers had to be enterprising and creative during the pandemic when it came to making films with small-to-no cast and crews.  However, the recent uptick with these things is kind of alarming.  Can’t we just go back to making… you know… REAL horror flicks and not this kind of bullshit?

The biggest problem with Amityville Hex is that it’s one-hundred-and-eight minutes long.  Not even an official Amityville Horror sequel deserves to have a running time that long.  It’s one thing for Burt Young or Tony Roberts to be running around the Amityville house for close to two hours.  It’s another thing when that length of time is spent on a bunch of doofuses looking dumbly into their laptops and/or appearing on Zoom calls.  Not only that, but much of the first half is devoted to repetitive scenes of people staring into the camera and reciting the hex.  Once they finally do start dying off, it’s all incredibly weak and pathetic, and none of the demises are worth a damn.  Except maybe when poor old George Stover (who deserves better) gets killed by his own lawnmower.

Aside from Stover, the only other real names in the cast are Lloyd Kaufman and Ouija Nazi’s Veronica Ricci.  However, all they get to do is recite the hex as part of a montage near the end.  How you can waste an actress as vivacious as Ricci in such a stupefying fashion is anyone’s guess.    

The only good part is when a couple watch Spider Baby on TV and you can hear Lon Chaney, Jr. singing the theme song in the background.  That’s about the best thing I can say about it.  

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE HAUNTING (2011) **

A group of friends break into the Amityville Horror house to film a sex tape.  One of the girls asks, “Are there beds in there?”, but her boyfriend bangs her in the bathroom anyway.  Sadly, before they can finish the deed, they are slaughtered by an unseen presence.  

Then, a family comes to look at the house.  Since they’re broke, a haunted house is the only thing they can afford.  (Although the actual Amityville Horror house would’ve easily gone for upper six figures, but realistic depictions of the real estate market isn’t this movie’s forte.)  Before the family can even close on the house, the realtor dies under mysterious circumstances.  On the day they move in, one of the movers falls down the stairs and dies.  Heck, almost every unannounced visitor to the home kicks the bucket somehow or the other.  

This is a crappy Found Footage flick that’s meant to capitalize on the success of Paranormal Activity, so that means the bratty son films everything with his camera.  He also uses way too many zooms and seemingly has never heard of the Auto Focus feature.  Later, the increasingly crazed patriarch of the family installs security cameras, which leads to more Paranormal Activity-inspired shenanigans.  Doors won’t stay shut, weird noises are heard, and the camera starts picking up strange images.  Things go from bad to worse when the family’s youngest daughter starts talking to an imaginary friend who may be the ghost of one of the original Amityville victims.

I’m not a fan of Found Footage horror but combining the genre with a fake Amityville film seemed like a no-brainer.  As far as these things go, it’s far from the worst one I’ve seen.  Even though the shaky-cam bullshit gets irritating, the body count is relatively high, and the pacing moves at an acceptable rate.  Does that necessarily mean it’s good?  No way!  However, when you’re in the middle of a month-long fake Amityville marathon, you take the small victories when you can get them.

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE HARVEST (2020) **

The Amityville Harvest was the first of three (unrelated) fake Amityville movies written and directed by Thomas J. Churchill in a three-year span.  Of the three, I’d say The Amityville Moon was clearly the best of the trio.  This one, while slightly better than Churchill’s Amityville Uprising, is just too inconsistent to recommend.  

Churchill does deliver a fine pre-opening credits sequence where a grieving widow gets locked inside a funeral home with only her husband’s corpse to keep her company.  This sequence works surprisingly well as Churchill does a good job at slowly ratcheting up the tension.  It easily could’ve stood on its own as a strong short subject.  However, it’s all downhill after the opening credits.  

A film crew arrives at the funeral home shortly thereafter to film a documentary on the Civil War.  They are greeted by the obviously evil owner, Vincent (Kyle Lowder), who is clearly a whack-a-doodle of the first order.  Eventually, he’s revealed to be a centuries-old vampire who actually (SPOILER) masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln!  

Churchill tosses everything in but the kitchen sink.  There are vampires, Confederate zombies, a mad doctor, odd dream sequences, ghosts that look like they were created by an out-of-control Spirograph, and even a scene that rips off The Shining.  Some individual moments work, but overall, it’s so all over the place that nothing really sticks.  The ending in particular sucks, which is a shame considering how much promise the opening scene held.  

Lowder makes for a lame villain.  He’s just too bland to be menacing and isn’t physically imposing in the least.  The supporting cast is pretty good though.  Sadie (Wrong Turn 4) Katz makes for a solid heroine, and it was fun to see Eileen (Linda Blair’s double in The Exorcist) Dietz as the cranky old biddy.  Johanna Rae is also quite fetching as the documentary’s hair and make-up coordinator.  

Sleepaway Camp’s Felissa Rose is listed in the credits as a co-producer.  I wonder if she was originally going to star in the film, but then had to drop out and the credit was there as an honorary type of thing.  One thing’s for sure, her screen presence is sorely missed.  She might’ve been able to make this wildly uneven flick worthwhile.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE DEATH HOUSE (2015) **

I thought I was in trouble during the chaotic opening scene.  It involved a bunch of people trying to burn a book of spells and a witch that turned into a crab-walking spider-woman.  I thought this was going to be another case where I got suckered into watching a sequel to something I hadn’t seen yet.  As it turns out, it’s only one of those “Start at the end and then rewind back to the beginning” openings.  That didn’t necessarily make it BETTER, but at least everything made sense eventually.  

Amityville Death House was brought to us by a team of heavy hitters.  And by “heavy hitters”, I mean it’s directed by Mark (Amityville in Space) Polonia, executive produced by Fred Olen (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) Ray, has special effects by Brett (They Bite) Piper, and “stars” Eric Roberts.  I put stars in quotations because although his voice is heard coming out of a warlock with an iron mask on his face, I don’t think it’s actually him behind the mask.  I think he did another one of those “literally” phoned-in performances a la A Talking Cat!?! where his dialogue was recorded off a speaker phone.

Roberts plays “The Dark One”, the seemingly omnipotent villain who narrates and relates flashbacks.  Sometimes, he hams it up using a vaguely British accent.  Other times, he sounds like… you know… Eric Roberts.  

Anyway, a group of friends returning home from delivering hurricane relief decides to make a pit stop and check in on their grandmother in Amityville.  No one in the group realizes she’s a direct descendent of the witch who put a curse on the town centuries ago.  (Although the townsfolk all seem to know what the score is.)  The kids find an old diary containing a bunch of spells and they stupidly read one out loud, and it doesn’t take long before the witch starts possessing and killing everyone.

Amityville Death House isn’t great, but it isn’t boring either, which is about all you can hope for from a fake Amityville flick.  At least there’s a lot of fishermen, hunters, stranded motorists, and moonshiners hanging around the outskirts of the plot to help the body count stack higher and higher.  The finale (which is essentially the beginning, but you know what I mean) is decent, and there’s at least one memorable moment involving “a witch’s teats”.  If it had one or two more nutty scenes like this, it might’ve been a winner.  

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE ASYLUM (2014) **

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.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE CLOWNHOUSE (2017) * ½

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.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE TOYBOX (2016) ** ½

Near the beginning of this movie-watching experiment, I reviewed Amityville in the Hood without realizing it was a sequel to Amityville Toybox and Amityville Clownhouse.  With that knowledge firmly in my back pocket, I will now set out to review the first two installments of the trilogy.  

Amityville Toybox is basically a loose remake of The Devil’s Gift (scenes of which later appeared in Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders).  A father brings his family together to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.  At the party, one of his kids gives him an antique wind-up monkey as a present.  Pretty soon, dad goes from being funny and cheerful to cranky and crazed.  Little does anyone know the monkey came from the haunted house in Amityville.  Before long, dear old dad begins seeing the ghost of his father who urges him to kill his entire family.

This is one of those fake Amityville movies that is set in the mold of the original franchise sequels where an item from the original Amityville house carries the Amityville curse onto another family.  As far as these things go, it’s better than you might think.  It starts out with a reserved depiction of the real-life DeFeo murders before it segways into a nice little ‘70s inspired opening credits sequence.  (There are also scenes of flies buzzing and characters chopping wood, like in the original, and there is an incest subplot that’s kind of like Part 2.)  

With the extreme Dutch angles, colorful lighting, incest themes, and scenes of squabbling family members being killed off under the same roof, Amityville Toybox kind of reminded me of a modern-day Andy Milligan movie.  Don’t worry, it’s better than that sentence suggests.  Mostly.  Just don’t be fooled by the title.  This isn’t a Demonic Toys kind of thing.  There’s only one killer toy, and it really doesn’t do a whole lot once the father gets possessed.  

I think this would’ve been a perfectly fine movie had it ended at the hour mark.  Unfortunately, it drags needlessly on for another fifteen minutes.  The epilogue involving some comic relief paranormal investigators was completely unnecessary and feels like it was only tacked on to get the film to feature length.  I could’ve easily done without the gratuitous set-up for the sequel too.  Despite those reservations, this is one of the better fake Amityville flicks out there.  

AKA:  The Amityville Legacy.  AKA:  Amityville:  Legacy.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE UPRISING (2022) **

An explosion at a chemical factory in Amityville causes a cloud of pollution to hang over the town.  A stormfront moves in, and soon Amityville is drenched in acid rain.  Citizens unlucky enough to be out and about in the storm get turned into melty zombies when the poisonous precipitation comes into contact with their skin.  Amityville police officers, who are already dealing with the arrival of a psycho prisoner to their stationhouse, try to stand their ground when the zombie menace tries to invade their precinct.  

Amityville Uprising is basically Assault on Precinct 13 crosspollinated with a zombie movie.  Unfortunately, it never quite lives up to that pitch.  I liked the fact that they made acid rain the cause of the zombie outbreak, but that’s about the only novel touch in the film.  Ultimately, it just takes far too long to get going and there are way too many moving parts and unnecessary supporting characters that gum up the works.  It’s also padded with a lot of news report footage featuring an anchor who keeps yammering on and on about the acid rain.  This stuff is especially gratuitous and could’ve easily been excised to make way for more zombie action.

If you can wade through the talky first and second acts, you’ll be treated to some decent face ripping and body melting effects.  Too bad the finale is rushed, especially when compared to the lethargic set-up.  While I appreciate the attempt to flesh out some of the characters, writer/director Thomas J. (The Amityville Moon) Churchill completely fumbles the ball when it comes to the sluggish pace.  He also fails to stick the landing with the downbeat ending.  Still, all things considered, for a low budget zombie flick (as well as a fake Amityville movie), Amityville Uprising isn’t terrible or anything.  

Churchill was also responsible for another fake Amityville movie, The Amityville Harvest, which I’m sure I’ll review sooner than later.

AKA:  The Amityville Rising.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE: THE FINAL CHAPTER (2015) ** ½

A twelve-year-old boy named Michael sees a monster kill his babysitter.  Naturally, no one believes him.  The kid is blamed for the murder, convicted, and sent to the nuthouse for fifteen years.  When the now-grown Michael (Logan Lopez) is released, he tries to readjust to life on the outside.  He has come to believe that a ghost named “Sickle”, the spirit thought to be the inspiration for the Grim Reaper, was the one responsible for the murder.  A team of ghost hunters befriend the unlucky dude and trick him into returning to the scene of the crime so they can summon the evil spirit of Sickle.  

Amityville:  The Final Chapter is similar in a lot of ways to Halloween Ends, except it’s the kid who is blamed for the babysitter’s death and not the other way around.  It’s also kind of like Mr. Harrigan’s Phone as there is a subplot where our hero is paid by a rich old man for conversation.  I only mention these other movies because despite the stigma of being a fake Amityville flick, The Final Chapter is just about as good, if not better than those big-name films.  

Although it has a cheap look about it, (most of) the performances are pretty solid.  Lopez in particular, is quite good in the lead.  I especially liked the sequence when he is released from prison accompanied by an over the top ‘70s-style folk ballad.  Thanks to his performance, I hung in there with the movie longer than I anticipated.  The frequent stalling tactics, and the fact that nothing supernatural really happens until late in the game was a little frustrating.  It also didn’t help that the “Sickle” character just looked like a dude in a mask from Spirit Halloween.  While it didn’t quite stick the landing, Lopez kept me watching.  

Oh, and if you already couldn’t guess, this has nothing to do with the Amityville movies.  (You can tell because the font for the opening title doesn’t match the font used elsewhere in the credits.)  Maybe that was for the best.  Sometimes, with these things, the further away you get from the Amityville lore, the better off you are as it frees you up to do your own thing.

AKA:  Sickle.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE THEATER (2015) *

Unlike some of the Amityville movies I’ve watched this month, this one actually takes place in Amityville and even opens up with a quote from Ron DeFeo.  That doesn’t mean it’s any good though.  In fact, this is one of the worst fake Amityville flicks I’ve sat through all month.

A young girl named Fawn (Monele LeStrat) inherits a rundown old theater in Amityville.  Against her lawyer’s wishes, she and her friends have a slumber party in the abandoned theater.  Naturally, the theater is haunted, and the evil playhouse won’t let the frightened teens leave.  The force that resides inside the theater then possesses the friends and kills them off one by one.  

While Amityville Theater doesn’t have the worst set-up in the world, whatever potential the premise did have is undone at nearly every turn thanks to the stilted dialogue, wooden performances, and sluggish pacing.  This might’ve been bearable if the dialogue hadn’t been so tiresome or if the cast had been gifted with grace and wit or if the movie itself had a pulse.  However, these would-be thespians (all of whom have thick Canadian accents) deliver just about every line as if it was the first table reading on day one of the production.  The only cast member with an ounce of personality is Hollie Anne Kornik, who plays Wendy, the goth chick who’s squatting inside the theater.  I’m not saying she’s great or anything, but she certainly deserves better than this tripe.

At ninety-nine minutes, it’s also way too long.  Seventy-nine minutes is about the expiration date on the running time for a fake Amityville movie.  This one is a good twenty minutes longer than it has any right being.  The useless scenes of the teacher researching the history of the theater don’t help matters any either.  The worst of these sequences occurs at the end when he interviews the mayor, who provides an eleventh-hour exposition dump and says, “Six must die!”

In short, Amityville Theater needs to be condemned.   

AKA:  Amityville Playhouse.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE SCARECROW 2 (2022) *

In a perfect world, I would’ve watched Amityville Scarecrow before I saw Amityville Scarecrow 2.  However, the only version of Amityville Scarecrow on Tubi is in Spanish, so I decided to skip it.  I guess I could’ve found it streaming elsewhere, but the way I feel is if it ain’t on Tubi, it doesn’t matter.  Besides, when did not seeing the original movie ever stop me from checking out the sequel?

The opening sequence has a couple with nearly indecipherable accents renovating a barn.  Why do they have such thick brogues?  Because the movie takes place in Amityville, ENGLAND!  (Since it’s so hard to understand them, I now think might’ve been okay watching the Spanish version of Part 1.)  

A year earlier, a bunch of people were found murdered at this rundown campground.  Now, the owners are trying to spruce the place up and reopen for business, hoping that everyone conveniently forgets about the murders (or the fact that the place used to be home to a haunted house).  Naturally, a creepy scarecrow is running around the place turning campers into mincemeat.

Amityville Scarecrow 2 is set more in a slasher movie mold than the haunted house shenanigans found in your typical Amityville rip-off.  In particular, it owes a debt to Friday the 13th Part 2 as there is even a campfire story that acts as the scarecrow’s origin.  We also get a Psycho-inspired shower scene in there, just because.  

This might’ve worked, I guess, if the kill scenes were any good or if the scarecrow had any personality.  As it is, he kind of looks like a grown-up version of Sam from Trick ‘R’ Treat wearing a straw hat and overalls.  He isn’t intimidating in the least, and the gore is weak too.  It also doesn’t help that the finale is nearly nonexistent, and the killer’s demise occurs offscreen.  

The lone bright spot is Chrissie Wunna as the bosomy babe who gets a sex scene and a shower scene before being killed off.  I wish she hung around a bit longer.  Not just because she provides some above average T & A, but because she’s the only one in the cast with any kind of personality.  

For the most part, Amityville Scarecrow 2 is slow moving, talky (there’s a lot of exposition scenes and discussions about “family legacy”), and uneventful.  Plus, the accents are so thick that it’s hard to make out what the actors are saying half the time.  I was almost tempted to turn on the subtitles at one point.  Then, I realized I didn’t really care that much about what was going on, and I didn’t really want to get up and grab the remote in order to find out.  

TUBI CONTINUED… AN AMITYVILLE POLTERGEIST (2020) **

A stoner gets a job housesitting for a family in Amityville.  It doesn’t take long for him to start hearing strange noises in the night, which puts him on edge.  Soon after, he’s having bad dreams, and eventually, he realizes the place is haunted.  

This is one of those flicks that are competently put together but are rather forgettable and disposable.  Heck, I’m not sure anyone would’ve ever watched it if it didn’t have the “Amityville” name attached to it.  Like Amityville:  No Escape, An Amityville Poltergeist goes back and forth in time as it focuses on two different sets of characters dealing with a haunting in two different time periods.  The scenes set in present day with the stoner house sitter investigating the weird goings on in the home work slightly better than the flashback scenes with the original homeowner coming face to face with the evil for the first time.  

I think this might’ve eked by with a ** ½ rating, but the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream sequence was a bit hard to take.  The love triangle shit with the stoner, his best friend, and his best friend’s girl didn’t do it any favors either.  It also didn’t help that the main specter was one of those Ring-inspired ghost girls with messy hair who crawls out of the TV and shuffles slowly around the house.  The scenes where she moves around in a herky-jerky manner and screams echo The Grudge too.  In fact, it might’ve been more accurate if the filmmakers had called it An Amityville Grudge instead of An Amityville Poltergeist.  

I did like the scene where the hero watches Horrors of Spider Island on TV though.  Later, another character is seen watching The Screaming Skull.  Usually, whenever characters are watching a public domain horror movie in a flick like this, it’s Night of the Living Dead, so seeing scenes from these other films was a nice change of pace.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE: NO ESCAPE (2016) * ½

A guy takes his friends on a road trip to Amityville so he can film his college thesis on fear.  He also watches a videotape made by the former resident of the haunted Amityville house as she films her new home as a video diary to show her husband, who is deployed overseas.  Our fledgling filmmaker and his makeshift crew eventually head out into the woods to confront the Amityville evil, and they wind up getting more than they bargained for.

Writer/director Henrique Couto cuts back and forth between the Amityville home movies and the present-day stuff with the college kids interviewing people and traipsing through the woods.  Basically, it’s one part Paranormal Activity rip-off, one part Blair Witch rip-off, and one part Amityville rip-off.  None of the parts are very good.  At least the gratuitous nudity helps keep it from being a One Star slog. 

The scenes of the Amityville housewife constantly filming herself is slightly less annoying than the shit with the college students in the woods.  However, the so-called “paranormal” shit she captures on film is pretty weak.  I’m sure if you really lived in a haunted house and your coffee cup moved around on its own, it would freak you out.  Unfortunately, an audience member watches horror movies to see some scary shit and moving coffee cups just ain’t gonna cut the mustard.  On the plus side, at least the home movie sequences don’t have nearly as much shaky-cam nonsense of the Blair Witchy scenes.  (I’ve had my fill of shaky-cam horror movies where characters go off into the woods, get lost, and argue, thank you very much.)  Too bad after such a long build-up the payoff is rather miniscule.   

Even the most die-hard Found Footage horror fan will probably have a tough time making it through the end of this one.

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE MOON (2021) ** ½

A church in Amityville runs a halfway house for wayward girls.  When the various delinquents, runaways, and junkies begin disappearing, a detective (Trey McCurley) is called in to investigate.  He figures out all the disappearances have occurred during a full moon.  Could a werewolf be responsible for the missing girls? 

Other than the opening title card that states the location of the church, there’s nothing here connecting The Amityville Moon back to the other Amityville movies.  Really, it feels closer to an unrelated Howling sequel than an unrelated Amityville sequel.  If we were judging this on the merits of an unrelated Howling sequel, it would earn relatively high marks (as far as Howling sequels go, that is).  The central premise is similar to Howling V (it’s a whodunit movie where a werewolf is the culprit), and the effects aren’t too bad.  While the werewolf make-up isn’t exactly great, I always prefer seeing a guy running around in a scruffy wolf suit rather than some shoddy CGI shit, so I’ll take what I can get.  We only get one werewolf transformation scene (which makes sense since the werewolf’s identity is kept secret until the end), but it’s a decent throwback to the old school days of werewolf filmmaking.  Crepe hair grows, rubbery fingers stretch out and extend, ears become pointy… shit like that.  The gore is OK too. 

The acting ranges from passable to solid.  The actresses that make up the residents of the halfway house do a fine job, especially in their group therapy scenes.  McCurley makes for an acceptable hero too, all things considered. 

I can’t quite go to bat for this one.  That’s mainly because it runs out of steam before it crosses the finish line.  I do have a tendency to grade these fake Amityville movies on a curve.  If it was a “regular” horror flick, it probably would’ve gotten **.  When watched within the confines of a month-long fake Amityville sequel marathon, you realize it’s not too shabby.  Since it’s certainly more competent than your average Amityville rip-off, a ** ½ rating is more than justified.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE IN THE HOOD (2021) * ½

A couple of gang members find a stash of possessed weed in the old Amityville Horror house.  Dollar signs in their eyes, they sell it on the street, and their customers soon become kill-happy possessed zombies.  Now, this certainly sounds like a can’t-miss scenario.  Somehow, writer/director Dustin (Zombi VIII:  Urban Decay) Ferguson manages to screw up a potentially great idea (Okay… “great” for a fake Amityville movie) in record time.

The set-up is silly, but fun, which is really all you can hope for from a fake Amityville movie.  Although some of it feels a little rushed, there’s no denying the potential of a plot about weed that’s been laced with Amityville evil and turns its users into zombies.  The problem is that once the boring detective character is introduced, everything stops on a dime(bag).  By the time he starts interviewing suspects and witnesses and they start relating flashback after flashback, it just sucks all the fun right out of the picture.  It takes seemingly forever for the film to get back on track with the killer weed plotline, and once it finally does, it craps the bed in spectacular fashion.  To make matters even worse, the editing during the final confrontation is nearly incomprehensible.  

I didn’t realize it when I put this on, but Amityville in the Hood is actually a sequel to Amityville Toybox and Amityville Clownhouse.  If I had known that beforehand, I would’ve watched them in order.  Scenes from both those films are recycled and reused as flashbacks to fill out the second act, and one clip even includes a cameo by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’s Mark Patton.  If you ask me, the flick needed less scenes from other movies and more of the Amityville ghost ganja shit.  

Despite the plethora of missed opportunities, I still say that any movie that features a homage to the awesome Amityville 3-D poster in the pre-title sequence can’t be all bad.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE IN SPACE (2022) ** ½

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.