If I were you, I would leave now
Main Cast: Jeff Kirkendall, Titus Himmelberger
Director: Mark Polonia
Man, I love me an “in space” movie. Hellraiser: Bloodlines, Leprechaun In Space, Jason X. Set a movie that has no right being in space IN SPACE and you’ve got a winner.
And obviously by “winner” I mean pile of crap.
Luckily, I went into AMITYVILLE IN SPACE with my eyes wide open and my expectations in the basement.
We open on Father Benna (Jeff Kirkendall, who has also played Father Benna in AMITYVILLE EXORCISM, NOAH’S SHARK, and the upcoming AMITYVILLE REX) as he enters the famous house. He’s met by an evil entity and Father Benna uses his God-given powers to pray that God send the house and the evil inside it far away. God hears the prayers and sends the house into space where it’s found a thousand years later by a ship, the Wyoming 227, that’s on a mission to blow up black holes by sending nuclear missiles into them.
I haven’t checked the science on that, but I have a feeling it’s faulty.
Anyway, the crew beams over to the house, finds Father Benna, and brings him back. But the evil entity has also followed them and proceeds to give the crew terrible visions. In retaliation, the crew beams back over, sets bombs all over the house, then beams back to the Wyoming, and blows the house to bits.
The end and we all live happily ever after.
Well … maybe not happily ever after. I mean, we still had to take this journey to get there.
You know you’re in for a treat when 90% of a movie’s sets are green screen projections. You know you’re in for a treat when the space movie’s weapons are all super soakers painted to look futuristic (in this case, dark red). And you know you’re in for a treat when the cyborg on the ship is a man in a sauna suit with a chrome mask over his face and an ill-fitted silver hood that doesn’t even close the gaps around the mask.
Again, maybe “treat” isn’t the right word.
Written and directed by Mark Polonia, with help on the script from Aaron Drake, AMITYVILLE IN SPACE features a cast of players who seem to work together a lot on the schlockiest, most ridiculous premises you’ve ever seen for horror movies. There’s SHARKULA, PANDASAURUS, and ZILLAFOOT (directed by ANTHONY Polonia). I guess it’s good to have a tribe, people who have your back and never question the incredibly poor choices you make. Then again, what do I know, maybe these movies are so cheap to make there’s no way to NOT make money on them and these people are all living the high life in mansions with big fancy cars. I mean, if that were the case, would it kill them to kick a FEW of those dollars back into the productions? A good MST- or RIFFTRAX-worthy movie is really only worth it if it gets riffed. If it’s just a terrible movie and Mike Nelson and the guys don’t make fun of it, then you’re just left with a terrible movie with no redeeming qualities.
The cast here, Titus and Natalie Himmelberger, Cassandra Hayes, Kirkendall, Tim Hatch, Ryan Dalton and Michael Korotitsch are all lucky to be getting work of any kind, and if this is the garbage they need to make in order to see their names “in lights”, then so be it. But holy crap this is some terrible stuff. AMITYVILLE IN SPACE is everything you would expect with a title like that, and nothing more. Which is unfortunate. The effects here are limited mostly to very badly-rendered CGI, probably done in MS Paint on a tower so old they couldn’t even get MySpace when it was a thing. There are a few very terrible exceptions, however. The demon that terrorizes the crew is a man in black with a demon mask that is half-covered most of the time by a black balaclava. How do I know it’s a man and not a demon when the face is so obviously demonic? The human hands.
And then there’s the entity they face in the house near the end. This is a coughed up hairball painted pink with a dozen googly eyes glued all over it and manipulated through stop motion.
For the most part, the effects are all as terrible as the acting, which is outstandingly bad throughout. Half of these people seem like they just learned their lines right before Polonia called “action” and are struggling to remember them already.
Is AMITYVILLE IN SPACE a fun movie? In a crowd, sure; I would definitely watch this again with my wife just so she can share in the awfulness. But if you’ve got the day off alone and are NOT watching it for the purposes of reviewing it afterward, then no, this isn’t a movie worth watching. Not alone anyway. In a crowd, sure. But this isn’t to be taken seriously; AMITYVILLE IN SPACE has to be a joke the director and cast are playing on us. Granted, it feels like a long way to go for a joke, but I can’t see any other reason this thing was made.
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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