One of the first movies to ever scare the shit out of me as a kid was The Amityville Horror 1979. It's tame enough to play on TV, but still suggestive enough to get under your skin a bit. It's got a great cast, a great score, and a great late 70s vibe.
Everything about it works for me, and in my mind, I knew the sequels would never compare, so avoided them. Maybe this movie was a bit sacred to me because of nostalgia, but as a horror fan, I'm ashamed of myself for waiting this long. Whether they're good or bad, there's no reason to wait this long for it, even if I've only ever heard terrible things about the sequels...
Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
Directed by Damiano Damiani (a name I've always thought sounded rather satanic, which is a good promo for this movie), part two is the prequel to the Lutz story about the DeFeo family, renamed the Montelli's, even though the DeFeo family was clearly specified in the first movie. Why is this? Well, this movie doesn't want to suggest that the DeFeo incident happened the way this movie goes down, because this movie has an interesting incest plot, an asshole father played by the great Burt Young, and an exorcism plot.
While it didn't work for me out of the box, I've grown to like the movie. Tommy Lee Wallace did the screenplay, and he's underrated. Another reason this works is that in retrospect, it's the last movie to feature a great score. The others are dull in comparison.
Amityville 3D (1983)
The first thing I noticed going into this movie was the lack of that score. That tells you immediately that the series is unstable and ready to veer into any tangent or niche it can find. After all, the true story elements are finite, so anything else is milking it, and they'll milk it hard.
Here, we introduce the element of researching psychic phenomena and the skepticism that goes with it. Our protagonist man in a suit buys this house for dirt cheap, and you can only wonder why. He lets his daughter move in (Lori Loughlin from Full House / Big House) and he has issues with the ex-wife on how to raise her. Ordinary family drama. However, there's a big fuckin' hole in the basement that leads to hell and exudes bad vibes, but who cares.
The Amityville curse is a bit of a cheat. It follows you well out of the bounds of the house's perimeter and makes up its own rules on how to fuck you over, and it's pretty sadistic. This movie isn't an exception ala the parking garage scene.
The overall story isn't as creepy as it ought to be, but there is a good scene toward the end involving the daughter on the lake. Then, we get to the climax, featuring more investigation by the psychic phenomena team lead by Robert Joy.
Fun
MGM planned this as their end, for reasons we'll get to shortly. It's 3D, which means that it can't get any "cooler" than this one, what with it's sparse 3D effects... but what good is 3D without a big explosion at the end? That's why this was thought to be conclusive. There isn't a house to haunt after this one, right?
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (1989)
Shortly before the third movie, a bunch of priests ransacked the house for a yard sale of haunted furnishings, and that's where our movie starts. This is TV movie, so maybe our quality will drop a notch, but it has a few good things going for it. We're still in the 80s, the daughter is cute, the son's hair makes me laugh, and the movie is still pretty cruel.
So the priests are actually trying to exorcise the house in the beginning, then a yard sale ensues, a lady gets a hideous lamp as a joke gift for his sister, and the evil manifests into a new home in California. Go haunt them for a change.
One scene that's laughbly awful is when the son nearly chainsaws his grandma to death. I'm surprised she didn't have a heart attack fending him off. But that's not the only spinning blade action you'll see around here. Garbage disposal, anyone?
The climax is also pretty laughable, especially when things fall off cliffs and it's insinuated that random cats are possessed by evil spirits, but whatever. It's actually pretty watchable.
The Amityville Curse (1990)
As soon as we get to the 90s, Canada takes over production of this bizarre spin-off and drops the ball big time. This isn't the Amityville house. This is an Amityville house. It has something to do with a priest murdered in the town of Amityville and his haunted confession booth is a gateway to evil activities for some reason. I found it hard to pay attention to this one. Trying something new (in a part 5 no less) doesn't always work. From here on out, we're DTV until this original series dies.
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (!?!?)
Fuck that last movie. It's back to the last idea we had, which was haunted artifacts. This time, we have a haunted clock that finds its way to a family in California. Just like part 4. With this movie, we have some time fuckery that can be pretty entertaining at times. It is a clock, so time will be damned. There were a few Pet Sematary 2 vibes in there as well, which was also 1992. Weird. The resolution here is more or less the same as Wishmaster, only before Wishmaster.
This movie has none of the qualities of the first three movies, but somehow manages to be one of the more entertaining of the DTV entries in the series.
Amityville: A New Generation (1993)
Okay, now what? How about a haunted mirror? This entry takes us into the art/photography world of New York where our protagonist's evil mirror is driving him crazy...er?
We have more star power in this sequel with David Naughton, Richard Roundtree, Terry O'Quinn, Robert Rusler, and Lin Shaye, but something isn't right here. When asked what scares him, our cliche 90s hero responds, "Republicans". At this point, I'm getting a bit too aware of how far we're straying from the actual haunted house movie we actually like, and that scares me. Where am I?!
Retcon Alert: We're informed of yet another vile incident at the Amityville House from before the DeFeo murders: We have a Thanksgiving feast gone wrong as a man blows his family away during dinner in 1966. But they'll only ever talk about the 1974 incident, just because.
Amityville Dollhouse (1996)
Guess what? We're back in California again. Our newlywed families unite in a Santa Clarita ranch after dad finished building his new house. However, there's a shack on the grounds that they finally bust into and there's a replica of the old Amityville house in there... How queer...
None of our characters know that history though, but a few of them come close. The two sides can't seem to get along because the sexy new mother of the household has an irritable nerd for a son, but at least there's a cool son in the home. In fact, he's so cool and buff that the mom is haunted with sexual fantasies about him. Yikes! It makes for an interesting watch though, that's for sure.
Naturally, things get weird, and despite being so distanced from where we started, this one surprisingly watchable. Production values are good, we have a few zombie ghost scenes, and even some cenobite knockoffs. Hellraiser was another one of those franchises that shat out sequels just as frequently as this one, and there's always portals to hell in these movies.
Usually, things hit rock bottom before they need a reboot, but I actually kinda liked this one. However, reboot away...
The Amityville Horror (2005)
I'm not going to spend much time on this one. I was somewhat excited for it considering I really liked Michael Bay's previous horror production The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This was before I knew just how shitty Michael Bay was, though. This movie leaves nothing to the imagination and it fucking sucks.
Amityville: Awakening (2017)
While it had a troubled production, it turned out rather well I think. Its planned 2014 release was a 40th anniversary deal, setting the film outside of the original films, which is to say in the world were Ronnie DeFeo actually existed. Our world.
It's been a while since I saw it, but this movie had the freedom to include "the" house again, and what they gave us was pretty close. If we're going back to the basics, it's all about recreating the crime, just as it has been in the first movie, and the end result was decent.
After all these years, I finally binged these turkeys: 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. I was expecting garbage, but I forgot how much I've trained myself to like garbage over the years that I finally fucking realized that I might like these movies, and I do. They're better than the Children of the Corn sequels for damn sure.
Vague Timeline: https://junkepics.com/calendar/timeline/?category=amityville
