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Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”

After toiling in the trenches with Nick Box’s three releases from the week of April 13, it’s something of a relief to jump ahead to May 8, 2023 with a discussion of Louis DeStefano’s Amityville Emanuelle.

Presumably influenced by the French book and film series of the same name (minus the extra “m”), Geno McGahee’s screenplay returns to a tried and true Amityville premise: a cursed object, a spectral haunting, and some sexy shenanigans.

Amityville: Emanuelle immediately situates itself within the “franchise”s canon with recreated footage of Ronald DeFeo’s murder spree in April of 1974. This is familiar territory: we’ve seen variations of the shootings in Amityville II, The Amityville Legacy, Amityville: The Awakening and more.

It makes...

Melissa Etheridge is nostalgic on set at Molly Malone’s, a local Irish pub on Los Angeles’ Westside, reminiscent of the older haunts she frequented when she was cutting her teeth more than 30 years ago. She’s filming the music video for her single “As Cool as You Try,” an allegory for her ascent from an aspiring performer fighting for attention to commanding a crowd as an esteemed performer with her own set of devout fans.

“Coming full circle in a bar, it’s really fun because that never leaves you,...