THE AMITYVILLE ASYLUM (2013)

Studio:       Hannover House
Director:    Andrew Jones
Writer:       Andrew Jones
Producer:  Andrew Jones
Stars:     Sophia Del Pizzo, Lee Bane, Jared Morgan, Eileen Daly, Sarah Louise Madison

Review Score: 

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Summary:

The newest employee at High Hopes Psychiatric Hospital uncovers the asylum’s sinister connection to the horrors of Amityville. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

1974 – Ronald DeFeo, Jr. kills his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island.

2013 – Lisa Templeton interviews with Doctor Elliot Mixter for a job as a cleaner at High Hopes Hospital. After sneezing on his hand during their meeting, Lisa is certain that she will be passed over for employment. Over the phone, Lisa tells her friend Nancy that the interview was a disaster. Surprisingly, Dr. Mixter then calls and offers Lisa the job.

Custodian Delaney trains Lisa. He introduces her to catatonic patient Mrs. Hardesty. Delaney then takes Lisa downstairs to Ward X where category A criminally insane patients are housed. The staff refers to the area as “Blood Row.” Delaney points out murderous patients Jerry Kimble and Dennis Palmer, “The Long Island Cannibal.” Lisa also meets inmate Sadie Krenwinkel. With a pentagram carved on her forehead, Sadie was part of a witchcraft cult that kidnapped and killed people for a demonic ritual. Delaney then introduces Patient X, an unidentified man who killed one of the hospital’s doctors.

While cleaning the floors, Lisa sees a little girl who asks Lisa to play with her. Lisa advises the girl to return to bed. Delaney later tells Lisa that there are no patients under the age of twenty at the hospital. After Delaney reports the incident, lead orderly Hardcastle berates Lisa for making his men search the grounds on a wild goose chase.

Lisa finds a file on Patient X while cleaning Dr. Mixter’s office. An orderly named Pemberton catches Lisa with the confidential folder and attempts to extort her for oral sex. Delaney interrupts and pulls Lisa out of the situation.

Lisa finds Mrs. Hardesty wandering the hall. With her back turned, Lisa hears Mrs. Hardesty say, “you are going to die in here.” Lisa tells Hardcastle and Pemberton that Mrs. Hardesty is out of her room. Pemberton and Hardcastle tell Lisa that Mrs. Hardesty died earlier that morning.

The little girl appears again and Lisa follows her into Ward X. The inmates there taunt Lisa as well as each other.

Lisa has a nightmare about an occult ritual. While cleaning Ward X, Sadie Krenwinkel reveals things that she should not know about Lisa and her deceased mother. In the bathroom, Lisa has a vision of her face covered in blood.

Inmate Dennis Palmer intentionally cuts himself with a blade. When Pemberton enters the cell, Palmer kills him and takes his keys. Palmer then enters Jerry Kimble’s cell and kills him, too. Hardcastle finds Palmer eating Kimble’s remains.

Lisa’s friend Nancy visits her at home and tells her about the history of 112 Ocean Avenue. The infamous Amityville Horror home was demolished and the asylum was built in its place. Lisa researches the DeFeo murders on her computer and discovers that the girl she saw in the asylum hallway resembles victim Allison DeFeo.

Nancy investigates at the library and learns that the land once belonged to the Sachem tribe. The Sachem tribe fled Salem in Massachusetts where they were persecuted by Christians for practicing witchcraft. One ritual involved sacrificing six humans in order to summon their god, “The Dark Master.” The tribe was chased off the land and a war ensued where witch hunter John Underhill slaughtered the tribe and buried them at the site in a mass grave. Chief Sachem vowed revenge and is now believed to haunt the land.

In 2009, a modern cult incarnation of the Sachem tribe emerged. A website devoted to the cult claims that six souls will be sacrificed on November 13, 2013. Sadie Krenwinkel was a member of the cult. Dr. Mixter testified at her trial.

Lisa visits Sadie’s cell to ask her how she has been able to access her blog on the Internet. Lisa finds contraband candles in Sadie’s cell. Sadie preaches the coming of The Dark Master.

Lisa brings her concerns about Sadie to Dr. Mixter. Mixter leaves the room to investigate. While he is gone, Lisa finds an admissions form written in her name on his desk. Mixter returns with two orderlies and commits Lisa to the institution. Lisa is fitted with a straight jacket and placed in a cell. Mixter tries convincing her that she suffers from paranoid delusions and has always been an inmate at the facility, not an employee.

At night, Sadie begins reciting prayers to The Dark Master. Wearing a black robe, Mixter gives a shotgun to Patient X and commands, “kill them. Kill them all.” Patient X shoots Sadie first. Lisa hears him shoot a second time. He later kills Palmer and Hardcastle.

Delaney rescues Lisa from her cell. They find a disturbed patient who cuts and peels off his own face. Delaney and Lisa flee through the halls, but Patient X eventually shoots Delaney.

Lisa runs until Patient X finally catches her. He fires the shotgun, but it is empty. Lisa stabs Patient X with a screwdriver and then smashes his head in a doorway.

As police sirens are heard outside, Lisa takes the shotgun and finds Mixter in his office. Mixter tells her that they only need one more sacrifice. While the two engage in a confrontation, the police enter and shoot Lisa. One year later, Dr. Mixter publishes a memoir on the incident titled, “High Hopes, Broken Dreams.”

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Review:

“Amityville” is perhaps second only to “Night of the Living Dead” for a word or phrase that is easily exploited for its association with the horror genre.  A lapse in copyright registration put “Night of the Living Dead“ into the public domain long ago.  Any amateur filmmaker, novelist, or random passerby with this knowledge is free to create whatever s/he wants and tie it into the zombie franchise free of charge.  And even though George Lutz trademarked “The Amityville Horror,” Amityville itself is still the name of a Long Island suburb.  No one can claim ownership of Amityville for inclusion in a film title any more than they can New York City.

In a chuckle-worthy coincidence that is really not all that coincidental, it turns out that “The Amityville Asylum” writer/director Andrew Jones was also the writer/producer of “Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection.”  “Asylum” has about as much to do with Amityville as “Resurrection” did with the Romero classic.  Incidentally, “Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming” is listed next on Jones’ upcoming project slate.  This gives one pause to wonder if any freely available horror IP is safe from the low budget stylings of UK production house North Bank Entertainment.

“The Amityville Asylum” opens with a presumed retelling of the 1974 DeFeo murders via montage over the title cards.  It is presumed because the camera lens is jammed in so far for dark close-ups of blurry images that it is a true test of the eyes to decipher what is taking place.  While the house at 112 Ocean Avenue remains a popular point of interest for sightseers and ghost hunters in reality, the movie’s fictionalized history has the residence torn down.  Violating an untold number of zoning laws concerning suburban development, Dr. Elliot Mixter then erects the High Hopes Psychiatric Hospital in its place, smack dab in the center of a residential area.

Lisa Templeton is the one person in Long Island who is blissfully unaware of Amityville’s sordid history.  She belongs to a stable of British actors playing characters that have a devil of a time unsuccessfully attempting to mask their English origins.  Although no one is fooling anybody about his/her true nationality, the feigned American accents are nowhere near as distracting as the actress who continually pronounces the town’s name as “Uh-middy-ville.”

After taking a job mopping floors as a custodian at the shadowy facility, the audience then joins Lisa for an on the job orientation that goes into a ridiculously coma-inducing amount of detail regarding her job duties.  Actual dialogue from the movie includes: “The steam is super-heated to 180 degrees and delivered at seven point zero bar pressure.  It can produce 115 liters of super-heated steam per minute … For concrete, mix in one to four parts water.  Brush or spray it on with the equipment here then leave to set for five to ten minutes.  But for those stubborn … marks, use this neat.”  Is this a horror movie or a commercial for Murphy’s Oil Soap?

The moments of mystery are tepid revelations along the lines of, “you couldn’t have seen a little girl because there is no one here of that age,” and, “you couldn’t have seen the old woman because she died this morning.”  In case the viewer is brain dead, such lines are delivered with an accompanying “do-do-dun” of piano keys to emphasize the “oooohhh” reveal as something supposedly supernaturally intriguing.

From there, Lisa and her friend Nancy piece together some malarkey about a cult, a Native American tribe that practiced witchcraft, the summoning of something called “The Dark Master,” and a lot of other things that make no sense when stirred together inside Amityville’s recently erected asylum.  Seeing any of these ideas in action might have been worthwhile, but “The Amityville Asylum” introduces its concepts as a stream of words read from Lisa’s computer screen instead of visualizing them as something truly terrifying on the actual movie screen.

In Germany, the movie is known under the title “The Nesting 2: Amityville Asylum.”  “The Nesting” is a little-known horror film from 1981.  When the distributor is so desperate to sell a new product that leashing it to a largely forgotten flick from over thirty years ago seems like a boon, then a movie has quality problems on a fundamental level.

Amityville residents long tired of the looky-loos descending on their neighborhood reportedly shout and beep car horns as discouragement to tourists posing in front of the infamous house.  It would seem that their frustration is at least partially misdirected.  Hollywood, and in this case the United Kingdom, has done far more to irreparably tarnish the name of Amityville than George Lutz would have ever dreamed possible.

Review Score:  20

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