Backpack! Backpack!
Main Cast: Mike Hartsfield, Lindy Hartsfield
Director: Evan Jacobs
There was a time when the Amityville name meant something. The original 1979 movie with James Brolin and Margot Kidder is a horror classic and rightfully so. The sequel starring Burt Young and Diane Franklin is, in my opinion, an underrated gem. Things get dicey with Amityville 3-D, and they go completely off the rails with 1989’s Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes, in which a lamp from the house on Ocean Avenue makes its way the home of Patty Duke’s mother and begins to wreak havoc.
Eventually any threat the name “Amityville” may have once carried was washed away and now any time you see a movie with that word in the title, you can be assured a horror movie is the last thing you’re in for. Oh, they want you to think it’s a horror movie, with titles like Ghosts of Amityville, The Amityville Exorcism, or The Amityville Terror. But I’ve seen several of these Amityville knock-offs and they’re all terrible, cheap movies that look like they were made on a camcorder from 1990.
And then one day a magical thing happened and the Amityville name became a parody of itself and we got works of brilliance like Amityville Bigfoot, Amityville Death Toilet, and my personal favorite, Amityville in Space. So far I haven’t seen any of these movies, but I did see this one: Amityville Backpack. I had watched half of the movie before turning it off and deciding I had to share this one with my wife.
In this masterpiece, Luthor Boots (Mike Hartsfield) buys a backpack at a garage sale, talks to the thing on the drive home to his studio apartment about how the backpack is just the thing he needs to help him get organized, then proceeds—after a very long scene in which he’s getting ready for work the next day and is trying to remember to grab everything he needs, his keys, his lunch money, his wallet, his phone—to forget the backpack on his bed.
That’s okay, because it gives the backpack—which transforms into an evil backpack—time to eat Luthor’s cat, Poopsy. It then goes outside and frolics in the pool, orders takeout, and has a beer. I’m not making any of this up, I even recorded the scene on my phone and sent it to my wife to show her what she was missing.
The backpack then goes on a tear, killing a maintenance man at Luthor’s work, a woman who rejects Luthor via text, and finally Luthor’s awful, verbally abusive boss, Mr. Bags. It takes Luthor’s only friend telling him the backpack tried to strangle him before Luthor begins to suspect there might be something wrong with his bag.
Well, the backpack’s not gonna take being tossed out in the garbage; it pulls a gun and tries to take revenge on Luthor.
I’m just gonna leave that there for you to soak up because anything else I say is just going to sound like I’m making it all up, but I assure you I’m not. Like I said, the Amityville name is now a parody of itself and if you watch an Amityville movie post-2017’s Amityville: The Awakening (which TRIED to be a horror movie, but was really more an Amityville-esque remake of A Haunting in Connecticut), you’re just asking for trouble.
Amityville Backpack probably cost $100 to make, and most of that went into making two versions of the backpack. Both are black. One has four windows in its face, like the famous Amityville windows on the house, while the other only has two windows, accented by some weird fringe that’s supposed to look like the brickwork that makes up the chimney on the house.
And how does this killer backpack do away with its victims? For the most part when someone puts the bag on, something no one can seem to resist doing, a drill inside the bag begins to whir which makes the wearer flail around like the bag is drilling into their backs. However, there’s never any blood or wounds on the body when they inevitably manage to fight their way out of those two straps that would normally just slide easily off their shoulders.
I had initially told my wife it felt like this thing was improvised from start to finish, and I find it very telling that the IMDb page doesn’t list a writer. There’s a director, Evan Jacobs, who might want to think about changing his name and going into witness protection, but no writer listed. There is, however, a cast, and my God. If you’re going to improv a movie, you get people good at, you know, improv. But if Mike Hartsfield (Luthor Boots), Chris Lohman (Maintenance Man), or Lindy Hartsfield (Mike’s wife, who plays Delilah Fontaine, the object of Luthor’s obsession) ever tell you they’re good at improv, you should slap them in the face and start belting out Henry Rollins’s Liar. These people flailed around looking for something to say, any words that might possibly move the scene to the conclusion they had in mind when Jacobs yelled “Action”, or possibly in an effort to pad out the runtime because if this thing was edited down to just the essentials, we’d have a 30-minute short on our hands. As it is, Amityville Backpack is a whopping hour and 23 minutes long.
While I can’t honestly recommend Amityville Backpack as a movie worth seeing, I can definitely recommend Amityville Backpack as an experience worth having. No, it’s not a good movie. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in the “horror movie” genre. It should hang its head in shame and walk as quickly past the corner where the cool horror movies hang out as possible without being seen and shamed publicly. It should join the director in changing its name and going into witness protection. But until that day comes, it is currently streaming for free on Tubi, and I seriously want everyone out there to take this journey with me.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write my in-canon sequel: Amityville Lunchbox.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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