THE AMITYVILLE CURSE (2023)

Studio:    Tubi
Director: Eric Tessier
Writer:   Dennis Heaton
Producer: Graham Ludlow, Kaleigh Kavanagh
Stars:    Michael Xavier, Tommie-Amber Pirie, Ennis Esmer, Jenny Raven, Vanessa Smythe, Mercedes Morris, Dillon Casey, Kenny Wong, Brendan Fehr

Review Score:

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Summary:

Six friends face frightening paranormal activity when they attempt to renovate the infamous Amityville Horror house.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Three months after previous owner Mrs. Moriarty commits suicide, longtime friends Debbie Klein, Abigail Blaine, Frank Winfield, Lucy Davis, Lucy's girlfriend Billie Montenouvo, and Debbie's current boyfriend and Abigail's ex Marv Sharpe purchase the reportedly haunted Amityville Horror house for a renovation project. Paranormal activity such as flickering lights and nightmares of their possessed friends killing them in bed with a shotgun begin plaguing everyone.

One morning, Frank inexplicably launches through a second-floor window and dies on the pavement outside. Frank's death is deemed a suicide, but the friends wonder if something supernatural in the house could have been responsible.

Ghost hunter Ben Holloway comes to the house hoping to conduct an investigation for his podcast. After Ben records surreptitious footage that brings unwanted attention to the house on social media, the friends invite Ben back for a formal interview. Ben spends the night. Frightened by something unseen in his bedroom, Ben rushes outside where he is struck by a passing car and killed. Later, Billie becomes entranced and uses a hair dryer to electrocute herself in the bathtub.

Convinced that upset spirits are haunting them, Lucy summons Reverend Dave Marion to bless the house. While inside the home, the priest mysteriously breaks his ankle and Latin words he writes on a wall in chalk change to "Die die die."

Debbie finds a child's crayon drawings that seemingly depict Marv and Abigail having an affair behind her back. Debbie confronts the duo at knifepoint about resuming their former romance, but the pictures suddenly change to innocuous images. Consumed by possession, Debbie turns the knife toward her torso and kills herself.

Familiar with him as a colleague at the university where he teaches, Marv brings in parapsychology professor Doctor Harrison Cole, who conducts a seance in the house. Marv becomes briefly entranced during the seance. Afterward, Marv insists on digging a hole outside where he finds a skull. The remaining friends agree to give the skull a proper burial in hopes that it will lay the supernatural spirit to rest.

Two months later, Marv and Abigail rekindle their romantic relationship, which worries Lucy. Lucy and Abigail confess to each other that they're still having nightmares of their dead friends. Although under the influence of possession at the time, Marv continues expressing skepticism and later claims he staged the skull discovery and burial so the women would stop blaming their strange experiences on an imaginary haunting.

Harrison Cole returns to the house to find Marv possessed. Meanwhile, Abigail and Lucy find a suicide note left behind by Mrs. Moriarty that confirms the house is haunted. Harrison tries to warn the women about Marv's possession, but Marv knocks him unconscious from behind.

Determined to destroy the house once and for all, Abigail begins dousing rooms with gasoline. Marv enters the home and attacks both women. Abigail ultimately kills Marv with a sledgehammer.

With the evil spirit now possessing her, Lucy attacks Abigail and stages her death to look just like Mrs. Moriarty's hanging suicide. Lucy gives authorities a false story about what happened that leaves her in sole control of the house.

Some time later, Father Marion finds Lucy seemingly mourning her dead friends at the cemetery. Lucy returns a crucifix that Marion previously gave her and ominously warns him to leave her and the house alone. Marion then reports his strange encounter with Lucy to Harrison, who is covertly working with Marion to monitor Lucy's possession and destroy the house. Lucy returns to the empty house where she smilingly says, "Honey, I'm home" to no one before walking inside.

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Review:

I can't tell you when or why an Amityville movie would ever be "good" for a viewer. Probably because I can't think of a time or a situation where an Amityville movie would ever be good for anyone.

I can tell you when and why an Amityville movie might be "good" for a reviewer. Just note that when I say "good" in the sentences above, I don't mean it in a qualitative sense. That term never applies whenever Amityville is involved.

After writing reviews for over a decade, it gets to be like riding a bike thanks to the mental muscle memory gained from doing it regularly. Even still, after taking some extended time off from the practice, rustiness remains an inevitability. In my case, where I've only been infrequently writing film critiques during the preceding few months, I figured I could use a softball to help me get back in the groove. And what better way is there for a genre critic to do that than to get down and dirty in the DTV depths of Amityville? These movies are so baseline, reviews practically write themselves.

"The Amityville Curse" is a 2023 thriller released as a Tubi Original. It's also a 1990 film that was only the fifth entry in the long-running supernatural saga back when Amityville was still something of a formal franchise. Both are loosely based on a fiction novel with the same title written by Hans Holzer, a parapsychologist who investigated the original Ocean Avenue haunting. The two films share some character names in common, although the similarities end there and neither really follows events from the book much at all.

Casual Tubi viewers who probably don't know there are literally hundreds of Amityville movies out in the wild might catch this updated "The Amityville Curse" and be like, "What is this nonsense?" For the rest of us seasoned horror hounds who are painfully aware of how far underground the bar lies for Amityville nowadays, "The Amityville Curse" actually comes off as pretty passable for this sort of throwaway thing. Now that I think about it though, if you're turning on Tubi in the first place, you shouldn't be anticipating triple-A quality anyway, so maybe it meets low expectations no matter who you are. After all, we don't go to Tubi for original horror content. Tubi is where we turn for reruns of forgotten TV shows from the 80s and 90s when there are no better entertainment options on hand.

However, if you're an indie filmmaker shooting a digital fright flick on chump change with a gaggle of no-names in a single location, it seems like a big boon to have that "Tubi Original" banner before the title. In an overcrowded market of Amityville muck, you're much better off having Tubi drop your plop directly onto a lazy person's landing page than hoping they'll somehow stumble upon it at the infinite bottom of an Amazon Prime rental barrel.

In this "The Amityville Curse," six friends purchase the infamous Long Island home with the intention of renovating and reselling it. Nigh immediately, doors start creaking and lights start flickering. Soon, supernatural activity escalates into supernatural slaughter as people are paranormally picked off one by one.

Something "The Amityville Curse" has that its similarly pedestrian peers don't is a pop of personality in its cast. A fractured family or partying teenagers are nowhere to be found. In their place are actual adults with real jobs like restaurateur, lawyer, and university instructor. Their dialogue is more convivial than purely functional, and even amusing like when one woman saves her friend from a falling mirror and gets a disappointed "I kinda wish you'd caught it" as a thank you because she doesn't want to pick up the pieces. Limited though they may be, these are people who reference personal histories, have distinct relationships with one another, and exhibit variable behavior patterns that aren't describable in simple summations like "bitch," "alpha a-hole," or "goody two-shoes."

On the other hand, what none of them have is any sort of lasting empathetic reaction whenever one of them dies in a shocking manner. Oh, they'll initially cover a gasp with a hand or something. Then in the next scene, they'll act like, "Man, can you believe our buddy we've known since college inexplicably flew out of a second story window to violently smash himself on the pavement outside? Anyway, who wants more coffee?" I mean, for crying out loud Lucy, Billie was both your girlfriend and your business partner. Show a little concern over her unexpected electrocution, why don't you?

"The Amityville Curse" also has moderately improved production values over those aforementioned peers in its low-budget category, with "moderately" lifting a heavy load in that assessment. Overexposure still creates blown-out windows and bright foreheads on actors lit like they're on a telenovela. And sure, the size of the house's exterior doesn't come close to matching interior dimensions. But, they still gave one bedroom quarter-moon windows, someone took a trip to Sherwin Williams so they could paint a room red, and the camera moves in a circle when two people have a conversation. It might be hard to tell if you don't have countless cheaper Amityville entries to compare this to, but "The Amityville Curse" puts in noticeable effort.

Now, do any of these "it could have been worse" observations mean you should watch the movie? Ask yourself this: Why would anyone willingly watch any Amityville movie made after 2005? Filmmakers apparently haven't figured it out yet, but horror fans know not to give a shot to vaporous Amityville thrillers when so many superior choices for small-screen creeps exist.

I wish I had more snark to sling, except "The Amityville Curse" is essentially what you'd think the average offspring of a marriage between Amityville and Tubi would look like. I won't bother to gauge what it might score without a bell curve. On a scale adjusted for "Amityville," it's a 50/100, which isn't too bad considering 90% of movies with that word in their title fall far below that midline.

Review Score: 50

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