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.
