It’s like Vegas, baby; never bet against the house
Main Cast: Nicole Tompkins, Kaiwi Lyman
Director: Michael Angelo
Another day, another Amityville movie under my belt. Originally I was going to watch Amityville in Space, then I thought maybe Amityville Backrooms. My wife suggested Amityville Death Toilet, but after watching a bunch of trailers I decided I needed something that looked like it had been made as a serious movie with people who might one day appear in other serious movies. So I started watching Amityville Haunting. I got about 10 minutes in before realizing I’d already seen it.
So I switched to The Amityville Terror.
I was partially right; some of these actors have been in other things, a few of them things I’ve seen. Was it a serious movie? Dammit, I knew you were gonna ask that.
The Amityville Terror follows the familiar pattern of “family moves into house they get really cheap, not knowing the house has a terrible history, family begins to experience weird goings-on in the house, family comes to realize house is haunted/possessed/cursed and tries to get away.” This time, we’ve got the added bonus of having a town that’s in on it and is okay with people being sacrificed to the house in order to keep the peace around town.
In this case, the family is made up of Todd (Kaiwi Lyman), his wife Jessica (Kim Neilsen), their daughter Hailey (Nicole Tompkins), and Todd’s recovering addict sister, Shae (Amanda Barton). I’m not sure why everyone is relocating—for Todd and company, all the way from LA to Amityville, New York—and rooming with Shae, but I assume it was covered in opening dialogue I missed? In the end, whatever the reason, the movie doesn’t dwell on it so neither will I.
Suffice it to say, things go south in the house real quick. Shae experiences acid burns while in the bath, Jessica’s roses all die and she yanks them all out of the ground in a rage, tearing her arms up from the thorns in the process, and Todd doesn’t notice a fuel leak one day while welding at work and causes an explosion that kills his boss. Then he goes home and has sex with his sister who is, at this point, possessed by the house and pretending to be Jessica.
Hailey, meanwhile, the new kid in school and hated by the popular girls, has made the acquaintance of the only teenage boy in town who isn’t sold on the idea of sacrificing people to the house no one wants to talk about. Together they try to solve the mystery of the house and save Hailey’s family.
It doesn’t go well. Thank God Hailey doesn’t go anywhere without her trusty crossbow.
The Amityville Terror isn’t a bad Amityville movie. It’s just a bad movie. Not a CHEAP-looking movie like some of these other disasters, it’s just not a good horror movie. It wants to be, but it doesn’t have the budget or the talent behind it to pull it off. It’s a throwaway, a movie the cast and creators made to add to their resumes, but not one they go around bragging about.
For first-time director Michael Angelo, this had to have seemed like a sweet gig, and for the most part I think he was up to the challenge of working within certain constraints, mostly budget. With more money he could have had better effects. With more money he could have hired better actors. But he made do with what he had.
As for screenwriter Amanda Barton, she was pulling double duty as writer and actress, playing the villain, or should I say overplaying. This was clearly a passion project for Barton who wanted to play possessed and wrote herself a movie where she could do just that. She was having a lot of fun, but given the number of credits with her name in them, as writer, wardrobe, make-up artist, production assistant, you’d think she’d have a firmer grasp on what she can and can’t do. Can she write a script that makes sense from beginning to end? Sure. Can she play the heavy in that same movie? Eh… I think she should stick to screenwriting. And even then maybe do a second draft before showing it to anyone?
Overall, The Amityville Terror is a passable horror movie. I think it only barely functions as an Amityville movie and could have been set in any town, in any house, and only used the Amityville name to get attention. I have to believe that’s the case, otherwise why change the names of the original occupants and what happened to them? This story is not tied to the Ocean Avenue house in any way other than being “set” in Amityville—it’s not even on Ocean Avenue, it’s at the dead end on Amity. In Amityville. Well, that’s not the address, so not the same house. But by the time the credits rolled, I didn’t feel like I’d just seen the worst thing to ever grace my television screen, so for now I’ll consider that a win?
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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