Amityville: Evil Never Dies

This film essentially begins with a woman by the name of "Mrs. Pangborn" (Sheri Lee) presenting a birthday cake to her teenage son and daughter. While she's doing this, her husband "Senator Ty Pangborn" (Dan Mauro) comes downstairs dressed in a clown costume and proceeds to murder all three of them with a shotgun before taking his own life. The scene then shifts to a week later with two young men and a woman breaking into the house and attempting to steal a picture of a clown which was supposedly taken from the original haunted house in Amityville. While trying to do so, however, a clown materializes and murders them all. After that, the scene then shifts once again to a man by the name of "Ben" (Ben Gothier) buying a toy monkey at a small shop and taking it home. But what neither Ben nor his wife "Michelle" (Michelle Muir-Lewis) realize is that this toy monkey was also taken from the same haunted house in Amityville, and it is possessed by an evil spirit which intends to kill both of them. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that the director (Dustin Ferguson) borrowed heavily from his earlier film "Amityville Toybox" produced about a year earlier. To that effect, not only did he feature the same toy monkey, but he also replayed several scenes from that earlier picture as well. Talk about a complete lack of imagination. Yet as dull as the plot turned out to be, the main problem with this movie concerned the extremely poor audio technique. More specifically, at times the audio was so low that it was difficult to hear what the characters were saying. At other times, the background music drowned out the dialogue completely. Not that it really mattered because there really wasn't anything here to arouse that much interest anyway. Be that as it may, although I very seldom give a film the lowest mark possible, I have to say that this particular movie is a rare exception to that rule--it's just that bad.

When I sat down to watch the 2017 horror movie "Amityville Clownhouse" (aka "Amityville: Evil Never Dies"), I have to admit that I harbored absolutely zero expectations to the movie, as the countless of horror movies being spewed out with the word "Amityville" in its title are questionable movies at best. But still, since this was a horror movie that I had neither seen nor actually heard about, of course I opted to check it out, given my love of all things horror.

Writers Dustin Ferguson and Joel Richards put together a boring script that only got attention because they opted to cash in on the success of the "Amityville" movie and because the very name is associated with iconic horror. But make no mistake, this movie was not going to become a classic, nor was it a particularly interesting or enjoyable movie to sit through.

Of the entire cast ensemble in the movie, I was only familiar with Mark Patton. And just how they managed to get him to show up in a movie such as this is simply beyond my comprehension. The acting performances in the movie were, for the most parts, fair. I've seen far worse performances in a low budget horror movies, such as this also was.

The audio in the movie was pretty terrible. In some scenes it was normal volume, but then in other scenes it was very low and making it hard or impossible to hear. The was just a very amateurish aspect of movie making and the movie suffered terribly from that.

If you enjoy horror movies, like I do, then do yourself a huge favor and don't waste 74 minutes on this dumpster fire of an attempt at making a horror movie.

The movie's cover/poster was actually the best thing about the ordeal.

My rating of director Dustin Ferguson's 2017 movie "Amityville Clownhouse" lands on a generous one out of ten stars.

Dustin Ferguson makes about a dozen movies a year, which seems really impressive until you actually watch one of them. It's tough to call what he does filmmaking. He basically sells footage to bottom feeders like Tubi. He turns on his consumer-grade camera and mostly just points it at stuff. I can't imagine this movie even had a script. There's a very rough outline and the actors just kinda figure things out as it goes along. That worked really well for "Blair Witch". This isn't "Blair Witch".

Low-budget movies usually tend to waste some time. Cheap horror movies that are all killer no filler are few and far between. Not everyone has the talent or resources to make the new "Evil Dead", and we accept that. Sometimes a walking/driving scene can go on for way too long in a thinly-veiled attempt to boost the running time, and we just kinda smile. That's fair. However, I don't think I've ever seen someone pad the running time so cynically and blatantly. "Amityville: Evil Never Dies" starts with two scenes that were clearly shot for a different movie, has the slowest credit sequences in cinema (ahum) history and gives us riveting scenes like a character walking to a park, sitting on a bench, making a drawing and walking back home. Of course the drawing or the park have absolutely no bearing on the plot, what a silly thing to ask. What do you think this is, a movie?

Granted, this is nothing new. While Ferguson himself claims inspirations by Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, in reality he's much more related to Jerry Warren. Warren was a prolific director in the 50s and 60s, but basically all he did was buy up obscure foreign films, chop them up, add just a bare minimum of footage with American actors and pretend it was a coherent movie. Much like Ferguson, he churned out products with no regard for quality or entertainment value. The main difference between Warren and Ferguson is that Warren was brutally honest about this in interviews. He knew he was a glorified con artist and never tried to convince us he was trying to make the new "Texas Chain Saw Massacre". Ferguson doesn't even give us that courtesy and tries to convince us he's making homages to his favorite movies. If you're making me defend Jerry Warren, you may not be very good at your job.

The most bothersome thing about productions like this is how they make it increasingly difficult to find a diamond in the rough. There are (probably) some promising directors out there who try to get a head start with a micro-budget horror flick, much like Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson did before them. I want to see these movies, but they're between hundreds of films by people who don't give a damn and are there for a quick buck. Even video stores, notorious for how much crap they had on the shelves, had much better ratios than that. If you genuinely love horror movies, for the love of God don't make them look like this. It's just going to turn people away from giving micro-budget horror a chance.

Several years after an unfortunate accident, a couple determined to move on with their lives finds that the increase of hostility on his end comes from an evil entity housed inside a cursed antique toy monkey that was initial bought at the original Amityville house and must find a way to break its influence over him.

This was a rather solid and enjoyable genre effort. Among the more enjoyable features here is the rather enjoyable setup that brings trouble to the couple. After the initial attacks at the old house and how they inadvertently buy the cursed monkey toy, the resulting scenes of them coming under strange occurrences are a great touch to add some suspense to things. From his sudden nightmares and cold behavior to her inability to get the psychic flashes out of her mind of the old house, the setup to what's going on is a perfectly serviceable setup that has a nice connection built up here with the toy's influence on their lives. As well, there's the fun that comes from the supernatural exploits present. With the strong opening of the father in clown-makeup blowing away the family during the birthday party giving a great idea of what's in store here, The rest of the scenes are quite fun, including the spirits killing the lookers in somewhat chilling and graphic encounters, the flashing-red lit sequences of him under the influence killing the prostitute and later beating on his wife or a later ambush on a visiting neighbor. A fine finale detailing the battle with the creatures is somewhat brief but still works nicely with the bizarre flash images of the demons and the deranged images at play during the scene. The other great factor here is a nice bit of building a psychological change that begins affecting him as the film attempts the idea of him being influenced into acting out-of-character, much like the characters from the other entries. While it seems illogical to wait as long as possible without doing anything, especially with how he acts during these scenes of berating her and even getting physical, there's some fun work here involving these scenes furthering the possessed doll nicely. The few scenes where it suffers from its low-budget limitations including some padding and a few glimpses of the limiting effects do bring this down somewhat, but not enough.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, and Brief Nudity.

This movie made me dumber watching it and it gave me eye cancer