Many people know the true story of the famous haunting in Amityville, NY. It started in 1974 when a man named Ronald “Butch” DeFeo, Jr., seemingly without motive, killed his mother, father, and four young siblings in the middle of the night. Upon his arrest, he claimed it was some sort of mob hit. Later, he admitted to hearing malevolent voices commanding him to commit the atrocities, and that he himself was indeed the murderer. He had no reason to kill them. He just felt an urge to kill his family swiftly. DeFeo is currently serving six consecutive life sentences.
Also well-known is the story of the next family to occupy the house at 112 Ocean Avenue, where the murders took place, all thanks to the 1977 true-crime/horror book called The Amityville Horror. In it, a reporter named Jay Anson detailed the brief stay in the house by George and Kathy Lutz, and their strange, supernatural experiences there. George supposedly began experiencing similar violent urges that DeFeo claimed to have. The family heard eerie noises, and started to find weird ectoplasmic slime on the walls. They found hoof prints in the snow outside their home. Doors flew off their hinges on their own. The family priest was called in to bless the home, but he fled after sensing a weird presence in the home, and developing wounds on his hands (!).
Not as well-known was the revelation that the haunting was, sadly, a hoax. DeFeo’s attorney, William Weber, admitted that the Lutzes used the murders as fodder for a publicity stunt, and that DeFeo agreed to help them. Despite this, haunted house aficionados still seek out 112 Ocean Avenue as a haunting tourism site. After all, murders were still committed there, and the Lutzes did flee after only a few days’ stay. Also, the house looks spooky. I wrote all about this hoax a few years ago for a now-on-hiatus-website called 90ways. Do you believe in spooks?
Even less well known than the details of the hoax, however, are thedetails of the bonkers and astonishingly long-running series of films based on the original book. Many may recall the 1979 feature film The Amityville Horror, and some attentive horror fans may recall the 2005 remake, but did you know that there were actually eleven (11) feature films about the Amityville haunting? Seriously, dude. 11. Between 1979 and 1996, these things were churned out pretty regularly, as feature films, as TV specials, as straight-to-video curiosities, and as 3-D experiments. In 2005, there was that remake. In 2011, there was another sequel employing the fond-footage style that seems to be so popular this year. If the Amityville haunting was a hoax, I’d say it’s still a pretty successful one. The Amityville series of films has been, unlike some of its more high-profile slasher counterparts, been quietly subsisting for decades, largely unnoticed by the horror community at large. The Amityville series is the Walker, Texas Ranger of horror movies. You don’t know anyone who regularly watches it, but somehow it lasts for years and years.
I, you’re humble suffering film critic, have decided to devote the next two weeks of The Series Project here on CraveOnline to the Amityville movies in all their awesome (?) glory. Since there are so many of the damn things, I have to approach this series in the same way I did for The Series Project: James Bond. That is, kind of as a diary as I go. I have only, as of this writing, seen the first five of the films, and, next week, I will delve into the remaining six (including the 2005 remake). I’d spend more time on these things, but, well… you’ll find they’re pretty uniformly awful, and I don’t want to bog you down for three weeks in the minutiae of a series that is largely without continuity or quality.
To the brave, though, I ask that you take my hand, wrench the door open, and enter the Amityville house with me, as we try to dissect the meaning and the oddball mechanics of this long-running series. Just ignore that voice in your head telling you to “GET OUT!” And if you get the urge to kill me, that’s just the ghosts working their influence. I’m actually doing you a service.
The Amityville Horror (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1979)
Yeah, that’s the same Stuart Rosenberg who directed Cool Hand Luke. The guy’s no slouch.
So this first film is the mellowest and best-made of the series I have encountered to date. It came out in 1979, which was, in many ways, still in the wake of The Exorcist. Horror movies hadn’t moved into the slasher realm in earnest yet, and a lot of the high-profile horror films of the time involved demonic possession and hysteria in the suburbs, i.e. evil invading the most banal dwellings of the most unassuming white people. The Amityville Horror is most definitely of this school, as much of the film is devoted less to the mechanics of the ghostly apparitions, and more to everyday domestic angst. Some recent horror fans will likely be disappointed by the lack of bloodshed in the film. I have to reveal this right away: The Amityville Horror contains no kills.
The story follows George and Kathy Lutz (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) as they move into their new New York home, the famous Amityville house where murders had taken place just a few years previous. Margot Kidder is a devout Roman Catholic, and George converted so he could marry her. Their two children are from Kathy’s first marriage; we never hear mention of their biological father. Margot Kidder is very good in this film, and is decidedly less obnoxious than she was in Superman the year previous. James Brolin wears such strongly hip 1979 fashions that he, to modern audiences, might look like a parody. Indeed, in certain shots, he looks a bit like Will Farrell. It should be remembered that tight jeans, plaid shirts, grizzly beards, and immaculately coiffed, windblown hair were at the forefront of ’70s sex appeal, and a generation of girls lost their innocence to James Brolin. Try not to snicker too much when you see him.
Rod Steiger plays Father Delaney, Kathy’s priest, and he’s a class act, that guy. He really sells his part to the point of some delicious overacting. When Father Delaney first comes to the house to bless it, he is besieged by demonic flies (flies, you’ll find, are a recurring motif in these films), and he hears a demonic voice telling him to “Get out!” He flees in horror. He pukes. This house has the power to make the clergy puke. When Kathy’s nun sister comes to visit later, she also flees the house to puke. If Roman Catholics come to your house, and immediately flee because they sense evil in the air, and they vomit all over your lawn, I’d start looking for a new place to live immediately.
I go to a Protestant church, and I’ve always kind of resented the fact that, in horror movies anyway, Roman Catholics are the only ones who have the power to fight demons. How come there’s never a Methodist minister on the case? I guess because we don’t have nifty demon-fighting accoutrements the way the Catholics do. We only have coffee hours and fellowship and all the wussy stuff I’m sure you hate reading about, and certainly don’t have any kickass demon-fighting tools. I know that the recent remake of The Unborn had a Jewish exorcist at least. Father Delaney begins to complain to his superiors that an exorcism is needed, and the other priests claim that he’s over-reacting, and that the church doesn’t really do exorcisms like in that movie. Something that, from what I understand, really did happen: the real-life Father Delaney found painful wounds on his hands shortly after visiting the house. Steiger’s rantings on the matter are a wonder to behold. He also mentions a character named Sonny who committed the murders. I’m guessing this was a change from “Butch.” Later in the film, in a fit of hysteria, goes blind.
Anyway, as the days pass, the Lutzes notice creepier and creepier stuff happening. George, for one, stops going to work, and finds himself unable to really wander too far from the house. He chops wood incessantly, and complains that he is always cold. His hair goes wild, and he starts to look a bit like Christian Bale in Reign of Fire. The dog barks at nothing at all. Doors slam. In a strange scene, George’s brother, who is getting married that afternoon, complains that $1500 in cash that he had went missing. That’s a nifty trick. The demons can steal your money.
Indeed, I began to take a mental tally at this point as to what the ghosts could and couldn’t do. At my wife’s urging, I even wrote down a tally of what the Amityville ghosts do over the course of the series. In this film, they steal money, possess a car (causing it to crash), and summon flies. A full tally of what the ghosts are capable of will appear at the end of the next week’s article.
Eventually, one of Kathy’s friends – sensitive to psychic phenomenon – treks to the basement, where she senses the most evil. They break through a basement wall, and find the notorious Red Room, where there is supposedly a direct link to Hell. This entire property, we learn, was the site of an ancient Indian burial ground. But also a link to Hell. It’s unclear if the ghosts are from Hell, or if they’re angry Indian spirits. The way they seem to hate Catholics, though, I’m willing to go with the former.
One of their young children begins having conversations with an imaginary friend named Jody. Jody was the name of one of the victims from years before. The young girl seems to become increasingly detached, and watches in blissful cruelty as her claustrophobic teenage babysitter is mysteriously locked in a closet. The babysitter’s panic is actually kind of scary.
In the film’s finale, the crazy slamming and crashing reaches a fever pitch, and the walls begin to bleed. George admits that he’s been having visions of killing his own family. The family flees. When George enters the house one last time to rescue the family dog, he falls into a pit of black ooze. The black ooze will show up in future films. The house seems to be tearing itself apart from the inside. George, however, escapes. The final shot of the film is an intertitle card explaining that the Lutzes never returned to the house, which, indeed, they never did.
Most people involved in the film didn’t like it. Kidder has gone on record with her distaste, and Brolin resents that the film prevented him from getting work for many years. As it stands, the film is enjoyable enough as a minor horror classic, but doesn’t have the emotional or thematic heft of The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. I will say this: they seem to get ghosts right. In far too many haunted house pictures, we know all too well the motives and the location of the ghosts; their explanation becomes too rote and mechanical. In this film, we know the ghosts want people dead, and they’ll do anything to make it happen. Well and good.
The next film, I have found, will be the best in the series. It’s still, sadly, not very good.
Amityville II: The Possession (dir. Damino Damiani, 1982)
Why is this one the best? One simple word: incest.
Amityville II: The Possession drives its heel in hard to the series’ Exorcist elements, and is indeed about a proper demonic possession. It also arranges itself as a prequel to the events of the first film, detailing the original murders. This approach is, of course, all backward, as we already knew the details of the original actual murders. The DeFeos are not mentioned, and we follow, instead, a family called the Montellis as they move into the creepy Amityville house for the first time. By the way, we will not have any common characters in between films. The ghosts are the main characters.
Even though all the press on the films (including the liner notes on the back of the video box) call this film a prequel, no mention of the year is directly made in the film. It’s supposed to, by the liner notes, take place in 1974, but during the film, we see a character listening to a Sony Walkman, which wasn’t released to the public until 1979 or so. Maybe that’s just an anachronism, but the Walkman actually plays into the story: it is the means through which Sonny (Jack Manger), the eventual killer, hears demonic voices.
The Montelli family is less average than the Lutzes. Headed up by Tony (Burt Young), the Montellis are a brow-beaten and fearful family who live under Tony’s abusive tyranny. Tony threatens to hit his kids, and actually does at one point… in front of a priest. He pulls Sonny close at says stuff like, “You think you’re too old for a whoopin’?” The house looks different now too. It has a foyer for one. It still has the famous quarter-circle windows, though. Those windows get a lot of mileage.
Anyway, when the rest of the family is out, Sonny becomes possessed. Like we see his body get thrown around and his abdomen become all distended. He immediately takes on a sinister demeanor, and reacts to the world with a more flip cynicism. Father Adamsky (James Olson), when he comes to bless the house, is creeped out by Sonny, and the house in general; indeed, his sprinkler seems to spray blood at on point. It is revealed that the basement still has a direct link to the Sinister, but rather than a small red room, this film has a vast, damp catacomb.
Oh yeah. Incest. Don’t want to keep you waiting. When Sonny becomes possessed, his first evil act is to seduce his comely teenage sister Patricia, played by the cutesy Diane Franklin from Better Off Dead… Sonny doesn’t use some sort of lie to seduce her, nor does he cast any kind of wicked magical spell. His seduction, indeed, only takes about five minutes. He asks that Patricia undress, and she does, rather playfully. It’s almost like the setup for a porn film the way the scene plays out. Sonny then presents her with a pair of her panties that he pilfered from the wash earlier that day. Patricia looks at him intensely. He leans in for a kiss, and they get it on. The creepiest thing about the incest scene was how willing and eager Patricia was in it. Flowers in the Attic wasn’t this accommodating. Later in the film, Patricia tries to confess to a priest that she had sex with her brother, but can’t bring herself to do it. Later still, she confronts Sonny, and declares that she doesn’t feel guilty.
Sonny has an out to the whole incest thing: he was, after all, possessed by whatever lives in the basement. Patricia, though, was an eager participant. How oogy. Of course, Diane Franklin is way cute and will be the only actress to disrobe in any of these films until the sixth one. The film, then, has a campy fetishistic quality that actually makes it rise above its peers. Taboo! When Sonny later kills her, it has an added tragic edge.
So yeah, Sonny eventually flips and he does kill his family with a shotgun. But the film doesn’t end there. Indeed, we’re only about halfway through at this point. It merely shifts its focus to Father Adamsky, and his attempts to save Sonny from the evil that is still clearly possessing him. There’s a long, poorly-paced police and courtroom procedural which all eventually lead to Father Adamsky kidnapping Sonny from a police station so he can bring him back to the Amityville house to perform a proper exorcism. Even though he’s not really properly prepared, yadda yadda yadda. The demons get out. Sony goes to jail. Father Adamsky is left to face the free demons himself.
The acting is fine, I suppose, and the incest angle elevates the film, so it’s good enough. Like the first, not great, but kind of scary and kind of twisted and enjoyable enough. I’m sorry I’m not really moved to passion by this film, but these films a little too arch for usual haunted house stuff. Like the filmmakers decided that usual, ancient haunted house tropes are too obvious, and they need a new angle each time. The first was a true story. The second had a possession. As we go along, we’ll find weirder and weirder stuff. Wait until we get to the fourth film. When we’ll enter the realm of the utterly effing stupid.
First, though, let’s look at…
Amityville 3-D (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1983)
Yup, the same Richard Fleischer who did Conan the Destroyer, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Fantastic Voyage, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and dozens of other genre classics over the decades.
So there’s some debate as to whether or not Amityville 3-D is canon. I don’t know why exactly. It still has the same house. It’s still haunted. It still has swarms of killer flies. It has a “3” in the title, and the next has a “4” in the title. I guess because the house is destroyed at the end, some people feel that it should be rejected outright. I don’t know why the Amityville film fans would choose to reject this film, and keep parts four and five, which have even less to do with the Amityville series than 3-D.
Yes, the film was shot in 3-D, and is actually good about taking good care of the gimmick. In the 1980s, there was, some may recall, a brief resurgence in 3-D, leading to cheesy films like Parasite and Jaws 3-D. It’s too bad I didn’t get to see the film in 3-D. None of the home video versions feature the gimmick. Maybe if someone cares enough to make a Blu-Ray of this film it’ll get the star treatment. Most 3-D films don’t really employ the gimmick well, choosing to retrofit films after they’ve been shot in 2-D. This is the first 3-D film I’ve seen in a while that has regular shots of stuff sticking out at you. The style is weird in 2-D, but I’m sure it was fun in 3-D.
The story follows a fellow named John Baxter (Tony Roberts), who writes for one of those killjoy skeptic magazines that regularly debunks hauntings, possessions, UFO sightings and other fun fringe stuff. John talks an awful lot about how he’s a hardcore rationalist, and insists that there’s a logical explanation for everything. The stuffy “there must be a logical explanation” guys in horror movies are almost invariably toast. At the film’s outset, he debunks a séance being held in the Amityville house. To sort of spite his fearful colleagues, he decides to buy the house and move in. The basement still has a demon hole, but now it’s in the form of a well under the basement floorboards. Does the house have the power to rearrange and rebuild itself? I’m guessing that it does.
John has a teenage daughter Susan (Lori Laughlin) who, along with her best friend (a young Meg Ryan) mess around with Ouija boards, and invoke the wrath of the in-house demons (y’know, as teenagers tend to do; I sure had a great time dabbling with the dark arts with my own Ouija boards). Susan is eventually killed in a freak boating accident (which happens off screen), and her mom (Tess Harper) moves in, thinking she’ll have a crack at talking to Susan’s ghost. Mom, you see, saw Susan’s ghost in the house the moment she was dying on the shore outside. John is disgusted with the accidents, and refuses to believe there are any ghosts. John, however, has already been presented with a photograph of a ghost, and his partner (Candy Clark) died in a mysterious car fire that destroyed all evidence of any ghosts. Why won’t he look a ghost in the eye? Oh yeah, so his daughter’s death-by-haunting can have a twinge of irony.
Much more open to the idea, and a much more interesting character, is John’s professor buddy Elliot, played by recognizable character actor Robert Joy. It’s Elliot who moves into the house with the hundreds of pounds of ghost-hunting equipment, and who eventually records the ghost. I love piles of ghost hunting equipment in movies. Eventually Elliot does manage to stir the ire of the ghosts, who flood the basement from the basement well. He is also attacked by a newt monster (!) who breathes fire on his face (!!). Yup. We see a demon. And it looks like the creature from Xtro.
Given how the ghosts reacted to having its picture taken earlier, they, I guess, in a fit of anger, decide to destroy the entire house. It explodes entirely and the credits roll. It’s hard, at this point, not to question the motives of the ghosts, which are, technically speaking, the only common characters throughout the series. Clearly, they hate humans and want to see them dead. But do they want to lure humans to their deaths, or merely punish those who stomp around on their land? They can slam doors and summon demons and even possess you when you’re on their property, but they can also set fires in cars that are miles away. I wonder what their radius of haunting is. What do the ghosts ultimately want? I guess, like all good ghosts, they want to scare you, and that’s just about it. They like being spooks. And if the ghosts have to explode their own house to scare you, by gum, they will.
Now is the time I ask that you put on your rollercoaster harness, and grit your teeth. We’re going to now delve into one of the dumbest films ever made…
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (dir. Sandor Stern, 1989)
Welcome, boys and girls, to Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, a really, really low-budget canonical sequel to the Amityville series that features the least threatening villain since the bed in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats or the refrigerator in Attack of the Killer Refrigerator. The monster is so un-evil, that it wound up on a wonderful list compiled by The Onion a few years back. This film introduces a dangerous idea into the world of Amityville that will linger over at least one other sequel, and is a hard thing to buy, even if you (like me, a hardened horror fan) can suspend your disbelief for days at a time. All the evil we’ve seen… all the ghosts… all the possessions… Imagine all that concentrated into a single lamp. An evil, evil lamp. A lamp that can, uh, strangle you with its cord and light up even when it’s not plugged in. A lamp that can drive a van by remote. A lamp that… that… it’s a lamp.
It’s a sodding floor lamp! That’s the bad guy in this film. A vague stink of evil that comes off of a floor lamp. To be perfectly fair, it’s a kind of creepy and ugly floor lamp, but, well, it’s hard to make a stationary object be menacing. And yet the director is gonna try. So we’re treated to endless menacing close-ups of the lamp’s shining head and brass body, and to loving shots of its mysteriously unplugged cord. If the lamp could speak, or clearly contained a single, thinking entity, it might have worked. Might have. But it only contains the same vague evil we’ve seen in the previous films. Vague, not scary.
Something else you may immediately notice about Amityville 4 (apart from the stupid monster), is its shoddy production value. This is because the fourth film was an NBC TV movie. It aired on regular network TV, which meant that the filmmakers could not show any serious gore or violence. The acting was sub-par, and it had nice, even, bland TV lighting. The film has no atmosphere, no character, and a dumb story. It borders on the bonkers. And it’s not scary for a second. The film stars Patty Duke at a low point in her career, and she does give the part her all, but there’s clearly not a lot to work with here. Jane Wyatt plays Patty Duke’s mom. Aron Eisenberg (from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) plays the young son, and he’s the weirdest looking kid I’ve seen in a long time.
At the opening of Amityville 4, we see a team of priests infiltrating the Amityville house to exorcize the demons once and for all. Finally. Just get it over with. A young priest encounters the lamp in question, and he actually witnesses the Evil leave the wall, crawl up the lamp’s cord, and hide out. Like he actually sees a little Bugs Bunny-like bulge travel up the cord. Before he had a chance to do anything about it, he was dragged off by the other priests. Too bad. Later, all the stuff in the Amityville house is sold at a yard sale (!), and the lamp ends up in the hands of Jane Wyatt’s sister, who cuts her finger and dies of tetanus. That’s so evil.
The lamp ends up getting mailed to California where Jane Wyatt lives. Patty Duke and her three kids have just moved in following the death of their father/husband. The lamp, when it’s plugged in, sort of infects the house afresh. Yeah, we’re no longer in Amityville. But whatever. The evil escapes.
From there, it’s low-stakes evil. The young daughter gets sort of possessed and wants to kill people. The teenage son plays with a chainsaw, and it nearly hurts someone. Nearly. No one dies. A guy sticks his hand into a garbage disposal, and it grinds his hand off. A plumber checks the pipes, and he is drowned in a flow of black ooze. Oh yeah. The black ooze is back. Remember that stuff from part one? When the plumber is not found, the house/lamp sort of possesses his van, and drives it away. The lamp is eventually moved into an attic.
The rigmarole continues in a predictable and stupid way. It’s only 90 minutes, but it seems to drag. Maybe the commercial breaks would have helped. Eventually the young priest tells them what’s what (and the evil makes him puke!), and they confront the lamp in a finale. The little girl tries to kill her family, and someone throws the lamp out the window where in breaks on the seashore below. Oh yeah, this seashore? We don’t see it on the outside of the house.
The final shot is the family housecat sniffing at the lamp’s shattered remains. It looks up at the camera and its eyes glow. The cat is now evil. We will not see the cat again. Well, we might.
So, yeah… Bad movie. Bad. It’s almost fun to watch for how dippy it is. Almost. For the most part, it’s a weird idea to add to a haunted house picture. Again I ask: Why would Amityville fans want to reject the third film and not this one? This one is way more embarrassing. Consider this, though: if all the artifacts in the Amityville house were as evil as the house itself, how cool would it be to have a TV series where someone went around tracking them all down? Each episode could be a different artifact. Oh wait. We had that series already. Oddly, it was called Friday the 13th: The Series.
Wait. Did anyone else notice that the house fixed itself? Does this take place before Part 3? No. I choose to believe the house repaired itself and restored all its old furniture.
The Amityville Curse (dir. Tom Barry, 1990)
I was uneasy with this film. The house, for one, was not the same house. It’s based on a real house. You have real blueprints. Can’t you make a set that looks like the previous films just a little? Maybe the “curse” of the title refers to the entire town now? Are we even in Amityville? Indeed, there are only passing references to the fact that we’re in Amityville at all. Upon closer examination, though, I noticed that the signposts that read “Amityville” were never featured in the same shots as any of the main characters, and the only dialogue where Amityville was mentioned was done in voiceover. Some cursory internet research leads me to the fact I had suspected: This was not intended to be an Amityville film.
The Amityville Curse started its life as a different haunted house film, and was rebranded to cash in on the “Amityville” name. I don’t see why you’d need to; I’m guessing The Evil Escapes didn’t set the world on fire. But, seeing as the evil escaped, and can now hide out anywhere, and there are never any common human characters between films, technically any and all haunted house pictures could be considered Amityville movies. The Amityville Curse. It’s not just a haunted house movie. It’s every haunted house movie.
I glance at the story: A quintet of while adults buy a house in Amityville (which may or may not be the house, even though it’s clearly not) with the hope of fixing it up and flipping it on the market. These people are all insufferable and mean-spirited yuppie d*ckheads, who snipe at each other and wear sweater vests. The leader of the pack is a guy named Marvin (David Stein) who can’t let ten minutes pass without mentioning that he’s a psychologist. His wife (Dawna Wightman) is skittish and wrings her hands a lot. There’s a boilerplate horny single guy (Anthony Dean Rubes). There’s a foxy Italian chick (Cassandra Gava), and her perpetually on-edge husband Frank (Kim Coates). These people drink heavily, and are constantly insulting one another in really mean-spirited ways. There’s some hints that they may be here to have a fivesome, but that never manifests. The only one who’s kind of interesting to watch is Frank, as he claims to not remember his own childhood. Like, none of it. What happened that he forgot?
It probably has something to do with the film’s prologue, wherein we saw a mysterious man murder a priest in a confessional. The confessional itself was moved into a hidden chamber inside this new Amityville house, where it has been attracting ghosts ever since. A few shots show that a ghost may still be stuck in the confessional. As we see later, the skittish wife character begins to see a young man who was arrested for the murder years before, and who hung himself. Whose ghost is haunting this place exactly? The priest or the murderer? And is he even the murderer?
This film went straight to video, but the production values are way higher than that of Amityville 4, so it at least looks like a real movie. It’s smoky and atmospheric in that chintzy 1990s sort of way, and the characters, while broad recognizable types, are at least comforting in their familiarity. Kim Coates, at least, manages to pull some genuine creepiness out of his role, and he seems dark, but interesting enough to land an exotic Italian wife. It’s not an awful movie. It’s just not interesting at all.
The ending is not much of a surprise (guess who the killer really was?), but it has some cool gore effects. A guy gets a jar of acid dumped on his face. A ghost pushes its face through the wall, so it bulges out the other side in a face shape. I love that effect. Someone gets the skin on their hand pulled off. All throughout the film, a woman’s hand wound refuses to heal, and it bleeds a lot. So I guess it hits all the horror movie beats correctly. Most horror fans may not object, although I suspect most will be seeking something more sophisticated. It just sort of lays inert, Amityville 5. If any of the films should be rejected from the canon, this one ought to be the one. I wasn’t even able to find a DVD for rent anywhere, and it’s most certainly not made it to any of the online streaming services. I ended up having to buy the VHS through the mail. I donated it to my local video store.
And that’s where we’ll have to leave it for this week, true believers. Stumbling awkwardly through the dark. As your humble cinematic servant, I will continue on my trek through these movies, and I will return next week for an equally baffled look at one good film (the sixth is not so bad), one remake, and one stab at revival. Be sure to join me for parts six through eleven of The Amityville Horror.
