Pranzo Oltranzista
Registered User
- Oct 18, 2017
- 3,981
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Amityville: No Escape (Couto, 2016) - "The new found-footage fright flick from independent horror maestro Henrique Couto" (famousmonsters.com). I had to read twice to make sure maestro wasn't spelled moron. I checked, and this guy really made quite a few films, but honestly, he must be a prime member of the short list of the dumber moviemakers ever. The one that did Il était une fois le diable, the worst film I've seen, claiming his film would be as good as the American ones and telling his cast they would become stars might still be in the lead, but Mr. Couto musn't be that far behind. I've tried to watch these terrible pseudo Amityville sequels I hadn't seen before (see below*), and this one is just the worst yet. It's pretty obvious that the project was first a simple Blairwitch ripoff, but that they for some reason decided to add the Amityville element to it. You end up with two found footage tales, both of them amateurish to the point of malaise, and a twist that makes no sense at all (and not because it is "supernatural", but because since George watched the old tape before going, he would have known!). They don't react much when they find a body in the woods, and they decide to split up and walk alone in the darkness in order to look for a little girl they're most of the time not sure they've seen ("I think I saw her" - hey freakin' [censored pejorative slur], this is a found footage film, just look at your footage if you're not sure you've seen the girl dressed in flashy white that was just in front of your camera light). All of the characters are ridiculously dumb, probably inspired by the dimlits who wrote that crap. 0/10
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I think the first film is ok, but I love Amityville II: The Possession (I also think the third film is pretty bad, but contains one of the finest film examples of uncanniness). Anybody can put Amityville in their film title, so there's just a lot of crap that's out there. I went through a few, and managed to find my previous comments in the search engine here, so once again:
Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989) - Yes, the one with the infamous evil lamp. Sandor Stern is the guy who wrote the screenplay adaptation of the original Amityville film. He also directed, the year just before this one, the Canadian cult classic Pin. Yet, you'd still wouldn't believe he is not a total [pejorative slur] after seeing this non-Amityville Amityville film. As he thought the stories from the book he was hired to adapt were too weak, he decided to write an original one, "inspired" by them. In this story, priests cleanse the original Amityville house, but the evil hides in a lamp that gets sold in a yard sale and is shipped to an old lady in California. Just imagine how dumb must that book be. After that, it kind of feels like Le démon dans l'île, in which house hold appliances go rogue and terrorize an island (it's actually a pretty good film, nothing like this Amityville lamp turd). Apart from the faked original house in the beginning and the weak attempt at recreating something vaguely similar to Schifrin's amazing score, this has nothing to do with the three films that came before it. Oh, and I will spoil it for you, once again defeated (or thrown through the window by a 70 y/o lady), the evil ultimately hides in the cat. Yes. 2/10
Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990) - Is this better or worse? It's still a heck of a borefest, but it's a little funnier. Just too boring to be so bad it's good. It's kind of a never-ending Property Brothers episode. When it puts renovations aside and tries for horror, there's a few remnants of Amityville tropes. It's somewhat closer to an Amityville film than the previous entry, with zero trace of the house (didn't even bother to find something vaguely similar), luckily no trace of the lamp, but still with a poor faux-Schifrin. In fact, it seems to be the whole Amityville town that is cursed, and they put a lot of energy reminding us that we are, in fact, in Amityville (in dialogues, New York car plates, road welcome signs...). Fun thing is the film was shot just up here Northwest of Montreal (that's in fact the most fun I've had, paused it to find the exact house on Google map). 1.5/10
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992) - This 6th Amityville film is based on the same book as the 4th entry (the one with the lamp, but now the evil is in an old clock). A man comes home to his kids way too old to need a babysitter with an old clock he stole from "a house he tore down". The house in question appears only in a stock shot flash overlayed to his actual atrociously ugly house, and that's it. Anyway, the evil comes from the clock and preceded the mess it caused in Amityville (still, the guy is obsessed with the Amityville house and designs miniature models of it, go figure). No time to try to make sense of this thing, even though it tries real hard to be relevant (the pun in the title came to fruition as I hoped and the film really is "about time", with a circular structure and everything). It's all very dumb, absolutely inefficient as a horror film, and it has not a thing to do with the first Amityville films. Randel is responsible for the only valid Hellraiser sequel, but here he f***s up pretty bad. Problem is, it's still kind of fun! I don't know if it's really bad enough to deserve a "so bad it's good" ranking, but that's where I'll put it for now. 1/10
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993) - So we had the Amityville evil hiding in a lamp (4th), coming from a clock (6th), and now I guess also coming from a mirror, not clear. What is clear is we have three films either adapted (6th) or inspired (4th and 7th) by the same book: co-producer of the three film's John G. Jones' own masterpiece. This one is the worst of the lot. I guess I was served, praising Ruiz's in-camera and practical effect and the rarity of this way of doing things, well we have here one crafty director (seriously, the shot I posted above is very cool - but don't get excited, absolutely nothing else is cool about this film, that's it, this one shot). Again, the Amityville house is on the movie poster but only appears in a stock shot flash (in the mirror this time), and the film fails at producing any type of lineage - in tone, pace or themes - with the first three entries of the series. And it's no fun. 1.5/10 (I keep my 1/10 for the "so bad it's good" films, so 1.5 is really the worst rating I can give a film)
The Amityville Haunting (Meed, 2011) - A found footage film in the Amytiville house? I guess I'm in. The house on the poster is clearly neither the Amityville house nor the house used in the film, and they didn't bother either to get their facts straight in the opening title cards (saying the Lutz lived in the house for 2 years instead of 28 days, making it... less scary?), so no surprise at all when you confirm right away that this is of abysmal amateurish levels. Not without a little drama (the realtor falls dead in the driveway when visiting and one of the movers falls to his death in the stairs with an empty box), a family of very poor actors moves into the house and the teenager son records everything, secret conversations and all. It's just terrible. 1.5/10 (but really, 0/10)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017) - First half lacks on atmospheric buildup and relies on easy scare tactics, but is still kind of efficient for me, mainly on one thing: that damn house. It felt good to be back (most of the post-1983 sequels don't seem to use it, and the house in the remake was just not the Amityville house). The last 30 or 40 minutes are a complete miss and waste. The film suffers mainly from being teen-oriented and wanting to be somewhat auto-referential and metatextual, with no point or payoff (oh, and in what must be one of the most "I should never have risked it" scene ever, they discuss the previous films - yes, that meta - and say the remake sucked... but wait, the remake made 23M$ on opening weekend, while this new and already forgotten "reboot" made a whooping 742$ on opening weekend in the US...
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