This movie realizes how to get my heart. By casting Diane Franklin in the role of Louise DeFeo and having Burt Young show up in an early cameo, it makes a link to the scumtastic Amityville II: The Possession. A discussion of backmasked records and an Ouija-board aided trip to the Red Room to start the film? Well, it’s already better than most of the non-connected Amityville films already.

It’s written and directed by Daniel Farrands, who I have taken to task over movies like The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. Perhaps my Amityville standards have been lowered by a week of watching every single movie in the series one after the other after the other.

The relationship between Dawn and Butch DeFeo is still the central theme of this film, but unlike the aforementioned second film, the incest angle isn’t hammered home quite so strongly. However, the brutal nature of the father, Ronnie (Paul Ben-Victor, who you’ll recognize as a character actor from so many films), is really on center display here.

I will say that the DeFeo house is way nicer than it’s ever appeared before. In previous films, it’s been shown as being large, but always in such disrepair. Maybe if I knew that this home on Ocean Avenue was so nice, I’d understand why people stuck around when blood came running down the walls.