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.  

EVIL DEAD RISE (2023) *

I guess it makes me an old fuddy duddy to say this, but here it goes.  Children, especially small children, have no place in an Evil Dead movie.  It’s one thing to abuse, beat, torment, vomit on, stab, and dismember Bruce Campbell.  It’s another thing when it happens to little kids.  

What makes it even worse is that it’s their own mother who torments them.  When her son plays a record containing transcripts from The Book of the Dead, it unleashes an evil spirit in their ramshackle apartment building.  The spirit soon possesses his mother, turning her into a cackling, depraved, demented Deadite.  Before long, she attacks her children and tries to make the evil spirits possess them too.  It’s then up to her no-good sister to protect the children and send the evil packing.

The pre-release buzz made a big deal that the filmmakers were taking Evil Dead out of the cabin and into an apartment building.  (The “Rise” of the title refers to not only the Evil Dead rising, but the location, a high-rise apartment.)  I guess it might’ve worked if the movie went into full-on Demons 2 mode, but most of the action takes place in a single apartment, with some occasional side trips to a hallway, a stairwell, the elevator, and the parking garage.  Heck, writer/director Lee Cronin makes such little use of the new surroundings that it makes you wonder why it just couldn’t have taken place at the cabin again.  I mean the wraparound scenes, which happen at a cabin in the woods, are the only sequences worth a damn in the entire thing, and only serve to remind you why it works best in that setting in the first place.  

Hell, it pains me to say this, but the gore isn’t even all that good.  We get a scalping and a scissors up the nose, but that is about it.  The much-ballyhooed cheese grater scene is a big bust.  Most of the pain is inflicted on the kids, which is just unpleasant.  If you want to see young teens eating glass and being butchered, then have at it.

It doesn’t help that none of the characters are compelling in the least.  Plus, all the callbacks to the previous movies fall flat on their face and are downright cringe-inducing.  Every.  Single.  One.  There are even moments that crib from The Shining, The Thing, and… uh… Fargo.  

The only touch I did like was that in addition to blood and bile, the possessed Deadites have now added jizz to the liquids they are prone to projectile-vomit.  One broad spewed so much seed you’ll swear she just got finished with a fifty-man bukkake session.  That’s not a ringing endorsement to be sure, but in a movie as massively disappointing as this, you’ve got to take what you can get.

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.