EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

I worry about AI a lot, because you know, I work as a writer in my non-constantly watching movies and writing about them time. I’ve been in this field for twenty-five years or more — this gets relevant for this movie as well, I promise — and I feel like I’ve been fighting Skynet since 1984 and now I’m being asked to embrace it.

This is all being confided in you, dear reader, because I feel like Amityville Emanuelle has been concocted by that very same AI that I’ve been asked to use for my work and not director Louis DeStefano (who also plays Detective James and is directing his first movie) and Geno McGahee (producer of Call Me Emanuelle, The Awakening of Emanuelle and the writer and producer of Amityville Cop and the writer, director and producer of Amityville: The Final Chapter, which was originally known as Sickle).

How else can we explain a movie that has Amityville, a spirit board and namechecks the character invented by Emmanuelle Arsan that has become a brand in itself, remixed remade and ripped off into so many different characters, whether black, white or in space?

How long did it take before someone realized that Emanuelle and Amityville are both available to put together and lure me into watching 65 minutes of the results?

That’s why I blame AI.

If you have watched any of the post-relevant Amityville movies by now — you can stop after the Canadian ones, if you’re like most people, or after the In the Hood ones if you’re like me — you should never look at the poster and decide to watch these movies. I promise you that hardly anything on this art happens in the movie or even gets close to it and looking at it will only spoil you for visuals that its creators and budget are unable to deliver.

As you know — you must know — on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in the suburban neighborhood in Amityville, located somewhere on the south shore of Long Island, New York.

This movie accepts that and even starts with a quick cut version of it to set up what we see next.

Twenty-some years later, Laura Lutz (Dawn Church) is working in marketing, of which she says, “I market things. I get people to buy things. It’s like advertising” as I screamed at the screen while I actually did marketing inches away from this prompt-created attempt to finally destroy my Amityville obsessed black soul. She’s also trying to date and hasn’t gotten any for a year because of, yes, marketing and good Lord, this movie is trying my soul because it’s hitting so close to home my dog is trembling as the house shakes this way and that.

She ends up going on a double date with her friend Allie (Linda S. Wong) and hooking up with a nebbish teacher named Evan (Chris Spinelli) who seems to be acting for the back rows of a theater that no longer exists. Oh — I nearly forgot. Some lady brought over a box of objects from her father — George Lutz, who was played by James Brolin and Ryan Reynolds once long before Amityville movies were made on a daily basis and I had to search Tubi every morning at 3:15 AM to see which ones had possessed my smart TV, forcing me to watch them eyes sleepily open, simply through just a touch of Lucifer’s burning hand.

One of the objects in the box of occult stuff her dad kept all these years looks like a cocktail shaker but the filmmakers assure us that it’s an urn. Well, that urn has the ashes of Ronald DeFeo Jr. in it, the father of this movie’s other lead, Gordon (Shane Ryan-Reid), who has been seeing visions of his murderous father more and more since he died in jail. And when his girlfriend Gena (Allie Perez) gets a Ouija board as a housewarming gift from Scott (Johnny Avila)and May (Joycelyne Lew)…I mean, who does this kind of thing? What kind of gift is that? Don’t you know what happens?

Well, they’re lucky because Gena’s cousin Janet (Saint Heart) is a medium. They need her pretty bad right now — she’s sure she’s going to die so she makes Gena promise to take care of her cat Roman — because Laura gets possessed by the spirit and it makes her hook up with two dudes at a bar and shows up inside her bed while she’s jilling off. Worse of all, Evan has gone murderous, killing everyone that comes close to her.

I fear that in all these words, I’ve somehow made Amityville Emanuelle more exciting than it is. It’s an Amityville movie with no real Amityville, not even a shot of the house, just connected to real people whose real lives were destroyed by the case. And I can handle exploitation — I wallow in it, let’s be honest — but when you go nowhere deeper than saying, “These are the kids of Amityville” and then just have them sit in a living room, this underwhelms even when I barely expected it to whelm. But adding to that ennui is the fact that they’ve somehow made an Emanuelle movie with no nudity and some of the most boring lovemaking scenes you’ll see outside of an afternoon soap opera. In fact, in one, the guy pulls a blanket over Laura’s shoulders while she’s on top of him. This is an Emanuelle movie, with one m, and that means that Joe D’Amato is practically spinning so fast in his grave now that he’s about to burst forth from the Earth at the utter gaul of making even a softcore sex movie the unsexiest sex you’ve seen since you found your parent’s hardback of Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. Children of the seventies, remember when the only nudity you could find was the Sears catalog bra pages? That was volcanic compared to this flaccid nonsense.

Nearly everyone that acted in this either produced or also worked behind the camera, no one is blameless. You do it to yourself, you do and that’s what really hurts, as they say. Or sing.

You know, if Joe D’Amato was alive, he’d be making movies with titles a lot like this, but they’d also have half the cast torn to shreds and sitting bloody and congealing in an acid bathtub while a schoolmarmish maid gave her adopted child of a master a furtive handjob, because that’s how you really make a scummy movie. Please learn from the masters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: She-Wolf of London was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 19, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 31, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 17, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 20, 1973 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 26, 1975 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, June 24, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 15, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

As a kid, I’d see a title like She-Wolf of London and prepare myself for lupine madness, only to be angered by the fact that there is not a single werewolf in this movie. Imagine how angry I am as an adult when I watch films like The Wolf of Wall Street!

Years before Lassie and Lost In Space, June Lockhart would play the title character. There’s been a series of murders at a local park and her relatives inform her that because the blood of a werewolf runs in the family and that she is responsible for the deaths. Not Maureen Robinson!

As our heroine begins to worry that she is the next to suffer the Curse of the Allenbys, her aunt both tries to help and worry her at the same time. I smell gaslighting! Can you smell gaslighting? Because I totally can.

Sara Haden, who plays Aunt Martha Winthrop, is perhaps best known for playing another movie aunt, Aunt Milly Forrest in thirteen Andy Hardy films.

This was directed by Jean Yarbrough, who also brought us Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Jack and the Beanstalk, one of only two movies that Abbott and Costello made in color (the other is Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd).

EDITOR’S NOTE: She Demons was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 10, 1970 at 1:00 a.m.

Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla, a model for Vargas and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin), Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung, Charlie Chan’s number one son) and Kris Kamana (Charles Opunui) are the only survivors of a shipwreck and wash up on a beach paradise that they soon learn is not just filled with demonic native women with spears, but also Col. Osler (Rudolph Anders), a survivor of the Third Reich who is using this little bit of heaven on Earth to experiment with lava and pain. The women have all become She Demons because Osler’s wife Mona (Leni Tana) had her face burned off by that hot volcanic magma and he hopes that he can fix it. So, you know, Eyes Without a Face, except that was made a year before that film!

Richard Cunha made Giant from the Unknown and Astor Pictures demanded that they would only release that movie if he made a second for a double feature. This is what he created and wow, I am so happy that it was filmed. A Nazi war criminal lives in a mansion tended to by island slaves, protected by an army, all surrounded by lava while he is vainly trying to fix the face of wife.

I don’t know if a better plot exists.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 5, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, June 28, 1969 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, February 27, 1971 at 1:00 a.m.

I really dislike anyone who makes fun of this movie. It’s been riffed and goofed on for years, but it’s way better made than it has any right to be and is filled with some big ideas that other movies from its genre and time never would dare to include.

Shot independently around Tarrytown, New York, in 1959 under the working title The Black Door, this film finds Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) as a surgeon who just won’t accept that death is the end for his patients. And when his fiancee Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) is critically injured in a car accident that he causes, he takes her head and along with his crippled assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna), he struggles to find her a new body to transplant her still living head on.

While Jan loses her mind due to pain and the sheer oddity of being alive without a body, Dr. Bill hits the go go clubs looking for the perfect body for her. That’s one of the strangest and most delightful moments here, as instead of just any body, Dr. Bill realizes that he needs a body that best answers his sexual needs, which means he cares less about saving Jan than satisfying his repressed desires.

Throughout this story and its slowly going mad rush to tragedy, there’s a past experiment hidden behind the door. It’s played by Eddie Carmel, a 7’3″ circus performer who was known as The Jewish Giant.

This was directed and written by Joseph Green, who owned Joseph Green Pictures. It was such a tiny corporation that it had one employee, Joseph Green, and brought so many wild movies to screens like Jess Franco’s Kiss Me Monster and Two Undercover Angels, Claude Chabrol’s Pleasure Party, Something Creeping in the Dark, Death Knocks Twice and his own film, The Perils of P.K. 

I love the way this movie takes our world and instead creates its own, a place where strippers fight on stage, where camera clubs are a plot point — Sammy Petrillo is one of the dirty men taking pictures! — and old girlfriends can be wooed back just to potentially get to be the body for a new fiancee.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

For a fun bit of science fiction horror with a 1980s aesthetic and an offbeat humorous vibe, you need look no further than director Sam Fox’s short-film blast of oddness The Blue Diamond (U.S., 2024). You know you’re in for a good time when Barbara Crampton is part of the cast, and that’s just for starters.

Crampton portrays Jacqueline, the recently deceased leader of a self-help cult based around, of all things, skiing. Her adult daughter Alison (Desiree Staples) travels to the group’s ski lodge for her mother’s funeral, and is understandably uneasy around the cheerful cult members, who behave in, shall we say, unusual manners and who dress in colorful 1980s ski outfits. The mother and daughter had a contentious relationship, and the more Alison learns the secrets behind Jacqueline’s freaky following, the worse things get for her.

Fox invests her unique short with interesting family drama, an engaging air of mystery, and plenty of highly entertaining bizarreness — wait until you get a load of the dance number. Crampton and Staples play off of each other marvelously. The short’s color palette and music scream “Soooo eighties!” and Fox directs with panache. 

The Blue Diamond is currently on the film festival circuit and screened as part of Beyond Fest, which ran September 25–October 9, 2024 in Los Angeles. For more information, visit https://beyondfest.com/

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Gregg G. Allin (Isaac Golub, who played Father Dingleberry in five Death Toilet movies, including Death Toilet 4: Brown Snakes on A Plane) — get it, G.G. Allin? — is a paranormal podcaster brought to Amityville by Mayor Dump (Roy Englebrecht, who was the boxing consultant for Celebrity Boxing), who wants him to “kill this toilet,” and by this toilet, I mean the Death Toilet that has been killing people in the same town where Ronald DeFeo Jr. was possessed all those years ago.

After the toilet kills the caretaker, the same man who has been randomly showing up to shoot hot snakes into the bowl, Gregg must battle the bowl, so to speak, to save the anuses of Amityville.

I always wonder about people who get to be in movies, want to brag to their family, and then see the name of their role, like Mike Hartsfield, who in this movie plays Misc. Men Making Mud Mounds.

Evan Jacobs has directed fifty movies, and this is one of them. Yes, all of the Death Toilets were directed by him and written by him. He also made the DV series about a serial killer who keeps filming himself. I would say that when he finally gets to the close of this movie, where animated birds, sharks, and flies all attack, it’s pretty funny. That took 55 minutes to get to, nearly an hour of people repeating themselves as they talk directly into the camera and act as if they’re streaming and being as dull as most streamers when they had every opportunity to retake these scenes and make something better.

However, the film does take a turn for the better, and the unexpected moment of a toilet uttering, ‘Leave!’ managed to elicit a genuine laugh from me. This is a level of humor that most Amityville movies fail to achieve, leaving you pleasantly surprised.

But if you haven’t made it through 47 other Amityville movies to get here, first of all, don’t. Please don’t make the same mistakes I have. Because you’re going to watch five minutes of this and hate yourself, hate cinema and perhaps even give up on life. Then again, if you’ve insulated yourself against things like plot, good sense and movies made with stock fire explosions that you can buy for less than the price of this DVD, dig in. It’s certainly at least as good as Amityville Karen and much better than Amityville Thanksgiving, a movie so caused that I feel like I never stopped watching it. Any second now, I will wake up, and it will start all over again. I’ll be trapped watching it forever and ever, amen.

You can buy this DVD from MVD or watch it on Tubi.