I love the guys at Wild Eye. After reading our Letterboxd list of Amityville movies*, I got an email from them that said, “Have you seen Amityville Island yet?”

Look, when a movie has the tagline “For God’s sake, get out of the water!” you know I’m probably going to have to watch it. Throw in the fact that it was directed by Mark Polonia (along with Paul Alan Steele) and I knew I was going to be spinning this, probably while my wife was asleep so that she didn’t cast a gaze at me that said, “You really will watch anything if Amityville is in the title.”

Several girls are brought to a small island where they are subjected to genetic experiments that involve both humans and animals. Right away, we have a women in prison, a science gone wild story and a government conspiracy flick all at the same time, but to complete this buffet, we learn that one of the girls killed people inside the house on 112 Ocean Avenue.

Perhaps the finest movie to ever be made for $30,000 in Wellsboro, PA, Amityville Shark succeeds just because it exists. It’s packed with a CGI shark, CGI blood, stock footage, a possessed woman blasting a dude through his PC and lines like, “She’s from Amityville, what are you gonna do?” and “High quality dirtbags are getting harder and harder to find.”

Oh yeah — there’s also a zombie that shows up before the end of this movie.

Of course there is.

You know, if we put low budget filmmakers in charge of solving COVID-19, I bet their ingenuity and ability to work with no money would solve it in no time. Or maybe we’d have female prisoners fighting in basements while random dudes in officers yell into their landlines. Either way, this time, we can all win.

I hope Mark Polonia reads this and hears my request: Please make a movie where the apes from Empire of the Apes ride sharks.

*Polonia also made Amityville Exorcism and is due to make Shark Encounters of the Third Kind this year.

You can buy Amityville Island here or watch it on Amazon Prime.