The true Amityville curse is that I must watch all of these films. Just look at this ever-expanding article and Letterboxd list.

Has everything been done in the world of 112 Ocean Avenue?

Director Shawn C. Phillips and writer Julie Anne Prescott say no and also want to speak to your manager.

Just look at this line: “Every neighborhood has a Karen and Amityville is no exception.”

Karen (Lauren Francesca) is so cold and mean to people that she insults them in her sleep. Her latest target is a local winery (run by James Duval!). After getting service that isn’t to her liking, she takes a bottle of wine. A bottle of cursed wine. I mean, this is Amityville after all.

That said, this movie may not need to be an hour and forty-five minutes. It could get tighter, but that said, it does have a death by corkscrew, which is always something that I enjoy in a film.

Somehow, the movie slides into an underground occult circle within the town — it’s Amityville, come on, be open — as well as female demons which means that yes, this movie may not have foreign investors demanding nudity but it has nudity all the same.

This is Phillips’ first solo film and he was wise to get Francesca as his lead. She’s really great in the role and is understated when you expect this to be out of control the whole time. The film nearly gets her to be a sympathetic figure if she wasn’t abusing everyone around her nearly all the time.

If you watch a lot of direct to streaming and disk horror, you’ll recognize a lot of the cast, including Jennifer Nangle, Caleb Thomas, Ashleeann Cittell, Derek K. Long, Marc Pearce, Mike Ferguson and Dawna Lee Heising.

I think what this movie needs are some fun taglines for the poster, however. So I will attempt to write a few in the hopes that they get used for the sequel:

For God’s sake, she wants to speak to your manager.

She’s so haunted that it’s unacceptable.

Do not lose her business.

All lives no longer matter.

Bleached. Bobbed. Possessed.

She demands death. And an apology.

I wait to see where Amityville movies go from here and raise you Amityvid-19, Make Amityvilel Great Again and Critical Amityville Theory.

You can get this from SRS and MVD. You can learn more at the official Facebook page.

I don’t know how many words I can write that don’t all just add up to a very simple statement: This is not for me.

But who is it for? At once it’s either the best-looking fan movie ever made or the cheapest appearing studio reboot of an existing property.

I grew up liking The Munsters just fine, but in a world where The Addams Family existed, it always felt schmaltzy and silly by comparison, like something some non-monster-loving suits concocted in a conference room versus something sarcastic and even thought-provoking. Think about it — what pop culture couple loves and supports one another as fully and perfect as Gomez and Morticia?

One of the creators, Allan Burns, even said, “We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoons. Because Universal owned the Frankenstein character and the Dracula character for movie rights, they decided to take their characters instead of the characters we had written.”

Also — it was produced by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who wrote nearly every episode of Amos ‘n Andy, so…yeah.

It took four pilots to get the original Munsters right, but the show lasted seventy episodes, as well as several movies like Munster, Go Home!, a cartoon and even some attempted reboots. There was even a 2012 series planned entitled Mockingbird Lane that would have been a dark take on the story and a 2017 Seth Myers-produced series that went nowhere.

Then came the news that Rob Zombie, a lifelong fan of the television series, would direct and write a remake. Zombie had wanted to make this movie for decades and had constantly included references to the show in his songs.

Then there were some teaser trailers and the internet lost his mind, either defending Zombie’s vision or taking a Cleveland steamer all over it.

The cast looks right. I mean, let’s start with the positives. Jeff Daniel Phillips has the right Herman Munster visuals, but his voice seems a bit off. Daniel Roebuck feels strange at first as Grandpa but it works. And well, Sheri Moon Zombie was playing Lily Munster no matter what.

This is also an origin story, showing how Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Brake) and Floop (Jorge Garcia) create Herman, how he becomes a rock star and how Lily falls for him, all while Grandpa spars with Zoya Krupp (Catherine Schell).

If you loved the show, well, perhaps you will be happy that nearly every character shows up, like Lester the Werewolf, Uncle Gilbert the merman, Zombo, the Tin Can Man (that’s Butch Patrick in the suit) and even Pat Priest’s voice on the Transylvania Airlines plane. And hey, for those that enjoy Zombie always getting great cameos, Cassandra Peterson shows up not as Elvira and Dee Wallace’s voice is in here too. And oh yeah — former Cinderella drummer Fred Koury as a raven.

Zombie shot this in a super heightened neon color scheme instead of the black and white from the show, saying “I noticed when the actors were in their makeup and they were just walking around, getting lunch or whatever, they looked like cartoon characters come to life. They were just so insanely colorful. I had to light the movie in the same fashion. It really seemed at all times like a live action cartoon, which was really exciting.” You could compare it to Creepshow‘s shock moments but when stretched across an entire movie, it might burn your eyes if you can even finish watching this.

Some of the jokes are beyond unfunny, like Herman yelling “Car 54, where are you?” which is not meta and merely blah. The one moment that hit me — thanks to Voices from the Balcony for calling it out — was Lily’s date with Orlock being a Type O Negative song. Actually, my wife had it right when she said, “I’d rather watch a movie about this vampire than any of these goofballs.”

The big problem is once the fan service and fun of seeing updates of all the characters wears off, there’s no story at all, hardly an antagonist and no real reason for anything to happen. Time stands still and people mug for the camera and eventually get to the house from the series and then, when you get to where you’d want to see what happens next, the movie ends.

I’ve long said I’ve not enjoyed Zombie’s films, but I loved his first two, House of 100 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Since then, it feels like he’s been treading water. This movie shows that when he doesn’t have the crutches of gore, grime, bleakness and non-stop swearing he doesn’t know what to do next. This is also the second time he’s taken an existing franchise and taken you on a journey you didn’t need to go on to see things you had no interest in seeing.

I really wanted to be proved wrong here and Zombie to pull off an entertaining reimagining of a property he’s loved his entire life and proving to me why it’s so essential. Instead, this is a banal, cheap-looking waste of time and energy that I watched three times in the hopes that I’d find something, anything to love and utterly failing at every turn.

But maybe you might like it.

Originally titled The Bride, The Invitation does a good job of retelling Dracula without telegraphing where it’s heaing.

Evelyn “Evie” Jackson (Nathalie Emmanuel) may be a struggling artist but she sees that she’s meant for more. By struggling, I mean she’s less an artist and more a waitress for a catering company. At one of the parties she serves, she takes a DNA kit and tests herself.

A week later, she learns that she’s from a rich family from England and meets her cousin Oliver Alexander (Hugh Skinner) and hears the story of her great-grandmother, Emmaline Alexander and the secret child she jad with a black footman/ Oliver invites Evie to an upcoming family wedding in England and meet her secret family tree.

When she arrives at the Carfax Estate, she learns that all of the upper crust are quite snooty and outright abusive to the hired help when just days ago, Evie would have been one of the people serving them. She gets to know the two bridesmaids, Lucy (Alana Boden) and Viktoria (Stephanie Corneliussen), and the lord of all this, Walter De Ville (Thomas Doherty), even better.

Of course, what with all the young female hired help getting killed all over the house, it turns out that Viktoria and Lucy are Walter’s vampire brides and Evie is the one that will complete the set, as at one point, hergreat-grandmother had married Walter, lived as a vampire and killed herself over her self-hatred over needing to drink the blood of human beings. Meanwhile, three rich families have kept Walter. known as “The Son of the Dragon” and maybe Dracula, in power.

Directed by Jessica M. Thompson and written by Blair Butler, The Invitation is a fine modern vampire movie. I’d love to see the R-rated cut as well as the two alternate endings, but that’s why physical media is still so important.

Directed by Christopher Hatton, who co-wrote this with Chuck Reeves, Raven’s Hollow is about five West Point cadets finding the body of a dying man in a town where no one seems to care and even worse, may take all of their lives. Also: one of them is Edgar Allan Poe (William Moseley, Peter from The Chronicles of Narnia series).

Between a demonic raven, a tell-tale heart and a man named Usher, this has tons of Poe references, as well as some good gore and a fun monster. I like the idea of Poe trying to solve this mystery, even if it feels a lot like Sleepy Hollow. The town of Raven’s Hollow is a lot deadlier, however. There’s a well shot opening of a girl being followed through the woods by an entity, an awesome scare when the dead body awakens to say the word “Raven” and even a little bit of doomed romance.

The real Poe disliked being in the army so much that he got himself court-martialed.

Horrortales.666 Part 3 naturally follows HorrorTales.666 Part 2, a film about which I said, “While this movie has beyond a small budget and even relies on mannequin parts for special effects, you can’t say that everyone didn’t put their heart (and other organs) into it.” The second film came eighteen years after the first movie but this third movie only took a year to get here.

Directed and written by Derek Braasch, Marcelo Fabani, Anthony Piseno (who this movie is dedicated to) and original director Phil Herman, this finds Joel D. Wynkoop returning to the role of the burglar who these stories revolve around.

This anthology features some horror cult classic stars such as W.A.V.E. Productions and Coney Island mermaid Debbie D and a cameo from Eddie Munster himself, Butch Patrick. There’s a possessed vase, lots of video effects, criminals killing one another, Facetime shot close-ups, a holiday home invasion, cordless phones being talked on in 2022, ASL dialogue and so many more elements stuffed into an hour.

There’s no budget, stories seem to just end and there’s a lot of yelling right in your face. In other words, if you liked the last film, you’ll enjoy this one as well.

You can learn more about this movie on its official Facebook page. You can order this from The Sleaze Box.

I’m usually against long movies, but this film is 159 minutes long and there’s supposedly a four-hour cut and I kind of wish there was an eight-hour one. Sometimes, you can eat too much candy and not get a stomachache and that’s how I feel about this; it’s near overwhelming how much Baz Luhrmann throws at you, nearly numbing your senses as much as dazzling them to the point where I couldn’t stop laughing at parts of the movie, but never at it. Laughing at the audacious nature of all of this, which is probably the best approximation of Elvis wearing his Captain Marvel Jr. suit standing in front of high rollers in Vegas, trying to escape and instead ranting from a darkened stage, saying things like “It’s called ka-ra-tay and only two kinds of people know it: The Chinese and The King and one of them is me.”

Elvis is a complicated thing. Chuck D. may have rapped “Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me you see/Straight up racist that sucker was/Simple and plain/Motherfuck him and motherfuck John Wayne,” but he also told the Associated Press, “…there was always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions. As a Black people, we all knew that. My whole thing was the one-sidedness — like, Elvis’ icon status in America made it like nobody else counted. My heroes came from someone else. My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes. As far as Elvis being The King, I couldn’t buy that.” He also told The Guardian, “You can’t ignore Black history. Now they’ve trained people to ignore all other history – they come over with this homogenized crap. So, Elvis was just the fall guy in my lyrics for all of that. It was nothing personal – believe me.”

As a teen, I was living with that knowledge that Elvis did not invent his music while the only songs of his I knew were the ones that got played the most, like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog.” I didn’t know the Sun sessions as much nor the spiritual songs. My image of Elvis was an old drugged out man in a jumpsuit shooting TVs, dead on the toilet.

So — and this makes me seem old — but when I couldn’t sleep at night as a teen, I’d scan the AM radio dial looking for something to keep my insomnia company. I’d often find music I’d not heard and listened closely to Elvis songs like “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto” and sure, they can be schmaltz, but they felt earnestly real and raw even in front of their huge production. I grew fascinated with some of the wilder moments of Elvis’ life, like scandalizing the country with his motions, him being obsessed with karate and law enforcement, his films, the comeback special, the dying days and the Memphis mafia and the Fool’s Gold Loaf, a sandwich Elvis used to fly to Denver to eat right on the runway as restaurant workers brought him and his crew the delicacy, which is made from a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jam and an entire pound of bacon. It fed ten people. Elvis ate his all by himself.

So yeah, complicated. Why do I celebrate Elvis flying from Memphis to Denver just to eat his own sandwich rather than make it by himself or getting someone else to do it, thereby destroying our fragile ecosystem with his gigantic carbon footprint while I’d hate anyone else who did that? Why do I feel badly that he squandered his gifts so many times, choosing to make Hollywood silliness when he could still make vital music at any time? And how could a cultural living god so easily be snared by Colonel Tom Parker?

I had no idea who Austin Butler was other than playing Tex Watson in Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood but man, he’s Elvis as far as I’m concerned. I keep seeing Tom Hanks in Colonel Parker, but Butler is just great in his role. Then again, I wasn’t really around much for Elvis being alive, so maybe my aunt who loved him might feel different, but she also thought MCI was a super secret terrorist cell and not a phone company, so I’m not so sure I want to call and ask her.

Speaking of Tarantino’s revise on real life, I was kind of hoping at moments in this movie, even though I know the sad ending, that Elvis would figure it all out, fly around the world, make the music he wanted to make and not slowly die a doctor administered junkie’s death. But real life doesn’t work out that way, does it?

Also: this movie had no moments of Elvis inviting numerous groupies over to wrestle for him in white panties or in mud, but I think this was working really hard to make you love Elvis and not just for how strange — or normal, I mean, if you had all that money and fame you’d make some wild life choices too — he was.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel 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.

The heady heyday of cinematic erotic thrillers is a few decades behind us, but writer/director Andy Edwards does his best to resurrect the genre for a new generation with Graphic Desires (AKA Graphic Designs; U.K., 2022). 

Edwards sets his feature in our modern, tech-obsessed world as bored work-from-home boyfriend Franklin (David Wayman) decides to try out a hook-up app for the first time when his girlfriend Candida (Sian Altman) goes to Germany on a business trip. He meets 18-year-old Atlanta (May Kelly), a transplant from Kansas to London, and the two hit it off well enough to provide one of the film’s many softcore sex scenes. Trying to keep things like this a secret rarely works out, especially in erotic thrillers, and he gets his app-designer friend Brandon (Ocean M Harris) involved when he thinks Atlanta has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. 

The proceedings can get a bit gonzo at times in Graphic Desires, and I did find myself scratching my head a few times at plot developments, but everything wraps up in an interesting manner. Edwards does a solid job at the helm, aided by impressive performances by the main cast members, and the technical aspects are all quite good. 

For those who enjoy cautionary fable substance with their sex scenes, Graphic Desires (AKA Graphic Designs) is currently available on-demand in the U.K. on Amazon, Apple, Sky, Virgin, etc. via High Fliers.