With “Kids In America” playing on the soundtrack over the sunshiny last day of Camp Briarbrook at the start of this movie, She Came from the Woods seems like the kind of movie that would be opening in theaters and drive-ins forty years ago. Instead, it’s on Tubi.
After the campers all leave for home. Peter (Spencer List), the bad boy grandson of the camp’s owner Gilbert McAlister (William Sadler) talks all of the camp counselors into conducting a ritual that brings back Agatha (Madeleine Dauer), the nurse who once terrorized the grounds with occult experiments four decades before.
Gilbert is planning to retire, leaving the camp in the hands of the rest of his family, which include good grandson Shawn (Tyler Elliot Burke) and their mother Heather (Cara Buono). But man, who can say what happens after this night, which starts with counselor Danny (director and co-writer Erik Bloomquist) losing his mind and attacking his crush Kellie (Emily Keefe) after she turns him down. This moment is completely shocking and out of nowhere, as is the further violence that follows.
Written along with his brother Carson, Erik Bloomquist has made a movie that doesn’t just harken back to the slashers of the 80s, but infuses the proceedings with tons of style, wit and no small amount of gore. And beyond the big stars like Sadler and Buono, there are good turns by Peter’s girlfriend Lauren (Clare Foley, Sinister) and Dylan (Adam Weppler).
Best of all, the movie also takes on more than just the slasher and supernatural, as an entire busload of kids goes missing in the woods and all suddenly become killers. You know how much a killer kid movie is appreciated around here.
The characters also make a point of not making the same mistakes as every other camp counselor. They don’t go off and make out in the middle of the murders (Veronica even screams at Dylan, “You want to f*** me to get my mind off my best friend being dead?” before punching him in the face), they call the police immediately and they work hard to not be separated. Not that it matters — whatever is out here in the woods is turning everyone insane.
Originally made as a short film made by Bloomquist brothers in 2017, I had a lot of fun with this movie. A lot of the reviews of it seem to take a holier than thou “how dare someone make another summer camp movie” spin and it kind of took me by surprise, as I really enjoyed what I watched. And you know, that’s the joy of watching movies for yourself and not depending on others to tell you if you should watch something or not. I mean, please keep coming back to this site and reading me discuss movies, but I want you, dear reader, to determine if a movie is something you like not because a group of hivemind sycophants thinks it’s good or not. Create your own sense of what you like and what you don’t. I don’t expect anyone to start liking late 80s Italian ripoffs of American movies, Turkish remakes or Philippines-shot war movies as much as me. I just got the whiff of “I have to show off my Film Twitter” cred in these reviews and you should remember: you are never as cool as the movies that you cover.
FP 4EVZ tells the story of JTRO (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his legendary family of rhythm game warriors, which includes Chia-T (Tally Wickham) and their daughter Chia-TRO (Lib Campbell). To save humanity from a sober future, they must use the time travel device known as the Remix Machine.
Also, if you’ve never watched one of these movies, they demand that you believe that Dance Dance Revolution is how people battle in the world after the end. In this world, it’s called BEAT, which means Balance/Expeditiousness/Aggression/Tempo.
Crowd funded at the same time as the third FP movie, this has Space Ducks coming back to our Earth to rule it once again and only Chia-TRO can be the chosen one who can dance against them.
If you can wrap your head around that sentence, this movie is for you. I asked Jason Trost about this series and how it’s grown and he said, “I’m making a movie that me and the close people around me want to make. A lot of people aren’t going to like them, but I don’t really care. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, we’re appealing to the people who like FP movies. They’re going to love these and I’m making these movies for them.
I’m not trying to make FP for everyone. I feel like there are so many movies now where they try to expand their audience and they lose the magic of what they were when they start targeting everyone. Is everyone going to like RoboCop? Probably not. But do some people love it?”
Trost also discussed how each film in the series has become a different style of film: “I feel like with each movie, well, they’re all parodies, so to speak. They’re all satirical, parodying new genres and new movies every single time. So the joke just continues to evolve. At this point, the same characters are almost in completely different worlds every time.”
So what movie is FP 4EVZ? “Obviously, a lot of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. Then there was definitely the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, Romancing the Stone, things like that. I definitely want this to be a high adventure, going after an artifact movie. I mean, the two main characters are a man and a woman who bicker with each other about their relationship.”
I loved every minute, but I’ve been into these films since day one. I live by the motto “Dance with your mind, not with your feet.”
Elizabeth Carter (Erica Mena, who played the role in The Stepmother and The Stepmother 2) is still looking for her perfect family and repeating the cycle of trying to make it work, losing her mind, killing everyone and then starting over again. She still wants revenge on her true love Eddie (Marques Houston, who played this part in The Stepmother).
Before that, she’s going to try and make college-aged young men her son and be shocked when they get weirded out by it. Then, she kills them and their dads. It’s wild because this movie feels like several movies in the franchise and not just one story.
You can laugh about Tubi originals, but how many movie series today make it to three films? How many streaming shows get premieres? I mean, Erica Mena wore a LaQuan Smith-designed dress and highlighter green Tom Ford pumps on the red carpet!
After seven minutes or so of flashbacks and Elizabeth screaming while she’s covered in blood and wearing a #1 Mom shirt, we learn that while she has used so many names, she’s now Michelle and married to artist Sam Collins (Tremayne Norris) who has a son named Bobby who may be going to college on a basketball scholarship but who refuses to call Michelle his mom.
Bobby doesn’t trust his new stepmother and he’s helped along the way by a nosy Karen named Kelly (Christina Rose) who is sure that she grew up with her in Florida and that she’s Elizabeth, not Michelle. She and her grandmother are so sure that they make a pie and bring it over. You know what you don’t do to murderous stepmothering antiheroines? Bring them dessert and keep bugging them. He gets a photo of Michelle from her past and learns about her real name, determining that she’s the infamous Elizabeth Carter and seconds later, she has Sam all tied up and bloody. And then he’s dead — she beats him with a crowbar — and so is Kelly, who should have just kept her trap shut in the grocery store.
Then it’s time for a shower and a new identity. And a new man.
Michelle becomes Chantel — complete with new contacts, pink wig and a Spanish accent — and sets everything on fire. In a few weeks, she’s picking up Eric Riley from her bar job. Three weeks — and some stock footage — later and they’re married in Vegas.
Yet just like the last marriage, his son Jared doesn’t trust his new stepmother. And when his rebellious daughter Taar comes and says that she needs to stay with him because she hates her mother’s new boyfriend. He and his wife did a Parent Trap with their kids and each took one. He also gave up banging the block — or dealing drugs — which really upsets Chantel as she thinks she got Eric wrong.
Chantel remembers that yes, she likes to kill people. It doesn’t help that Jared barely likes her even if she gives him the latest Air Jordans.
Meanwhile, Harrison Linbrook (Charles Malik Whitfield) comes into a police station and demands justice as his brother Eddie has been missing for 48 hours. Detective Nolan explains that the Phoenix Police Department has been investigating Elizabeth Carter for the last eight months and they believe that she’s responsible for his disappearance.
Wait a second. How much time has passed between these movies?
There’s also Agent Jennifer Conner (Vanessa Deleon) of the Missing Persons Unit. She’s also been looking for Eddie because she thinks it’s a kidnapping. And now they say that six months ago, Elizabeth was spotting stalking his brother. There’s some exposition about the past marriages and we learn that yes, the son Bobby is dead too. So is Gail, the grandmother of the Karen who caused all that drama. And they also mention Kevin and Dustin Smith from The Stepmother 2 and how she killed his friend Dustin.
That’s when Scott (Justin Sweat) shows up from the first movie with his girlfriend. She refers to Elizabeth as “the most dangerous woman on the planet.”
The manhunt — err, womanhunt — is officially on.
Meanwhile, Michelle has become Zooey again and kidnaps Eddie, leaving him shackled up so that she can be the perfect wife for him. Her entire house is filled with the same picture with the words “You are exactly where you are meant to be” on them and she screams, “My Eddie! He’s home!”
Of course, none of the cops are getting along and fighting over who gets the arrest.
Agent Conner interviews Kevin and Dustin Smith who tell her that his ex-wife was obsessed with Eddie. More exposition but man, at least these movies tie together well. I mean, I may be the only person that loves them, so is this fan service just for me?
Somehow, Michelle and Chantel are leading dual lives and are able to talk to each other. Eddie starts using her love for him to try and escape while his family tries to figure out how to save him. They post some videos about Michelle on social media and upload it.
Chantel has a breakdown over Taar and confesses to being abused by her past relationships while having a dramatic cry. She even tells him about having a baby boy Jason with Eddie and that they both died “in a pretty bad accident.” In the middle of this emotionally charged moment between husband and wife, Taar comes in and gives some attitude. I mean, this girl is going to die.
Then w discover that Michelle has a nervous breakdown every time there’s a full moon and it’s a crescent moon! What? She thinks about what Frank did to her and sees him everywhere.
The next morning, Eddie and Michelle or Zooey or whatever have a heart to heart and learn about exactly who Frank is. Frank was the first man to ever hurt her and her son Jason was all that she ever had that was good. And Frank took him from her. “He was a child! He was innocent! He had to watch me be defiled and treated like trash!” Then she explains a crime boss named Michael that she was with, a vicious man, a married man, who took her and Jason in for a decade. And when she got pregnant, she either had to get an abortion or die. His wife was going to kill them both. Frank came with them and eventually, from all the stress, she lost the baby. Frank stayed with her, though, but one day he decided that he was in love with her and then tried to assault her. Here we are with them bonding and we learn that Michelle and Zooey and all these women are different personalities.
Finally, Taar pushes things too far and gets knocked upside the head and gets her dad and brother covered in gasoline. Taar wakes up just in time to save everyone and Chantel runs away.
As the cops narrow down which cabin is Elizabeth’s, Scott has already found out the location and is trying to get revenge all by himself. There’s an amazing fight between Scott’s girlfriend and Elizabeth that brings us to the close of this as the cops finally arrive.
At the end of all of this, when Michelle has finally been caught and is in an insane asylum and looks like Asylum Hannibal Lecter, we notice a man watching her. He’s Michael Esposito (Vincent Rivera), who says that he has finally found her. And that’s where the movie ends which means that The Stepmother 4 is happening.
You know what made this movie for me? This meme by reddit user CreatorLuither69.
After finding the dead body of Commander Meeks (Jason Tremblay) and the body of a dead man with a similar tattoo to him — we see this guy get his head gorily blown clean off with a shotgun — Detective Grant Pierce (Jaime M. Callica) decides to take matters into his own hands and get revenge on whoever is running the ever-evolving, never stopping and always moving trap house that is filling his city with meth and the morgue with dead bodies thanks to all of its traps.
There’s a gas masked meth cook killer who is smart enough to jam phone signals as he lures criminals and cops alike to his trap house. The crooks — who include Roscoe (Fletcher Donovan), Sandy and Cormac, have forced Fibs (Peter Bundic) , a high school basketball player who has barely survived the death of his mother and the alcohol addiction of his father, to be part of their gang as they go Lights Out and try to rob the trap house. At the same time, Pierce is undercover and has left the cops after arguing with one-time friend Chief Bougourd (Benjamin Wilkerson) takes him off the case.
Directed by Nicholas Humphries and written by Jordan Robinson (Requiem for a Scream), this is a movie that basically has a trap house with traps. And a baby. They have a baby in the trap house! Nobody trusts anybody as they enter this den of drug highs and quick death. So they could either kill one another or have the house kill them. Man, I’m shocked the child isn’t armed or ruining its baby teeth by smoking up all that Christmas tree laying around!
If you didn’t like this, Tubi also has the movies Queen of the Trap House, Queen of the Trap House 2 and Dog Face: A Trap House Horror.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As I’ll be exploring the films of Chris Alexander this week, I wanted to share a few of his other movies that have been on the site before. You can learn more about the director at his official site.
Parasite Lady (2023): Chris Alexander has been making movies for Full Moon for a bit and I dug Necropolis: Legion — yes, it can never live up to the insanity of Necropolis, but it sure tries — as well as his Scream of the Blind Dead. He also made two other vampire movies, Space Vampire and Queen of Blood, which looks and feels like Jean Rollin and I have no complaints about that.
Arrielle Edwards plays the lead, a redhead pale vision that wanders the hallways of a hotel room and the tourist traps of Niagra Falls looking for victims. The first film I’ve seen from Full Moon’s Delirium Films label, this is the kind of movie that people are going to find on Tubi and get enraged about because nothing happens. It’s also the kind of movie that lunatics — like, you guessed it, me — are going to fall in love with, because not only does it feel like Rollin, but it feels like the last ten movies of Jess Franco, films that he shot in a meeting room in a hotel, with gorgeous women rolling around to music. Except this has sounds that seem like they come from not just underwater but somewhere in the dimension a few thousand doors away. Also: please know that me invoking the name of Franco is no slight; it’s the kind of honor I would not bestow upon many. Some people use the feel of Jess and brag about it. It takes a certain bravery to completely live in the nothing happens but everything goes down madness.
Alexander referred to it as the “next feminine, fevered, fluid-filled dream-state existential exploitation” that he’s making. It also has ties to past films, as Thea Munster is Lady Death from Girl With a Straight Razor. And Kate Gabriele and Ali Chappell are also strong in the cast. It’s like Alexander is assembling a company of players willing to go all the way into the darkness — and neon light — for his films. I also applaud this.
A dreamy movie filled with snow, carnivals and long nails that slice into milky white necks, all while distorted sounds and fuzzed out tones play. And just 42 minutes? Was this made just for me?
Scream of the Blind Dead (2021): Director, writer and musician Chris Alexander has taken what most remember from the Blind Dead films — synth-driven slow motion moments of a gorgeous woman being chased through the Spanish countryside by undead Knights Templar — and turned it into forty minutes of fright for Betty (Ali Chappell) who runs through the Canadian countryside in an attempt to avoid a Knight played by Thea Munster.
Imagine if Amando de Ossorio loaned out his creatures to Jess Rollin while allowing Jess Franco to shoot the Sapphic flashback scene of our heroine. As a nice addition for Eurohorror fans, Lone Fleming (Tombs of the Blind Dead, Return of the Blind Dead, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) is the voice that speaks over the film.
This isn’t a movie that I’d recommend to people who haven’t fallen in love with the Blind Dead or European horror where there’s no attempt at all in creating a story, just a mood that endlessly loops into your brain. This isn’t perfect but it gets the idea right. I’d love to see more of what Alexander can do in this definitely acquired taste of a genre.
Necropolis: Legion (2019): Necropolis is one of my favorite late 80s direct to video movies probably ever. How else can I do anything but become obsessed by a movie in which an evil witch — who looks like Tianna Collins or Lois Ayres — eats human brains to give the proper nutrition to her demon babies through her six breasts?
There’s no way that this movie can live up to that one, trust me.
Instead, this film seeks to be a reimagining of that tale. Satanic vampire sorceress Eva (Ali Chappell channeling Cinzia Monreale instead of acting as a punk rock devil woman) frightens the villagers of the past so much with her sex magick that they murder her inside her lair. A hundred or so years later, occult writer Lisa (Augie Duke) movies into that home and soon becomes the body with which Eva will return to our world.
Director Chris Alexander was the third editor-in-chief of Fangoria and the co-founder/editor of Delirium. You may have seen his other films, Queen of Blood or Female Werewolf. Working from a script by Brockton McKinney, who has worked on several other Full Moon efforts like Blade the Iron Crossand Weedjies: Halloweed Night, he puts together a decent enough film, but the love in my heart for the original is so strong. That said, the psychedelic visuals are strong in this and they didn’t skimp on the blood, the gore and the breasts with fangs in them, because isn’t that what Necropolis is known for? Even better, Lynn Lowry is always a welcome sight.
I want more of this story*, however, and here’s hoping that the end of this film isn’t the last that we see of Eva or Lisa. I’m usually one for less is more, but at sixty-one minutes, I found myself wanting more.
Necropolis: Legion isn’t going to replace the first movie and that’s fine. It’s still awesome to see someone else’s vision, much less knowing that someone other than me has seen the original movie.
*There’s also a comic book — available from Full Moon — that tells the origin of Eva.
Peabody Award winner Linda Moulton Howe, Monuments of Mars author Richard C. Hoagland, the History Channel’s David Hatcher Childress and other renowned international experts are here for Cybela Clare’s latest film which goes in deep to explain the colossal stone pyramids encircling our planet and the ones under Alaska, where someone whose father served there drops massive science on what his dad did under the ice.
If you’ve watched enough Discovery Channel, you probably know all about the black pyramid in Alaska and how they transform animals into bloodthirsty killing machines. This all started in the 90s, when Chinese nuclear test shockwaves revealed a pyramid-shaped spot of interference below the ground.
According to this article on Medium, on May 27, 2020, 41-year-old Nathan Campbell chartered a plane and flew out to Denali National Park and spend four months in Alaska with the hopes of finding the pyramid. He disappeared and was declared dead by October of that year.
Supposedly, this pyramid is bigger than the one in Giza. There’s not much out there online about this, which makes me think that is a real thing. Howe has been one of the people talking about it since she used to be on Coast to Coast, discussing how 18,000 people have gone missing an Alaskan version of the warmer triangle in Bermuda. Remember that thing?
She also shared an interview with Doug Mutschler, a retired US Army counterintelligence agent, who revealed how the U.S. military was trying to use the pyramid. He also claimed that a local channel aired a report about the discovery of the pyramid. When he called and asked for a videotape, he was told the show never aired.
If you want to know more, this movie has enough facts about this pyramid that you’ll be filled with ideas and wonder just why it exists and why we don’t know more about it.
Arianna (Stephanie Sanchez) is in college for business by day and a cam girl by night, raising the money that she needs for round the clock care for the sister injured in a car crash that she caused, one that also ruined the friendship she once had with India (Si Chen). Yes, a lot has happened before this movie even gets started.
There are a lot of lonely hearts that try to connect with Arianna on the site Faces for Sex. She’s also some kind of super hacker, able to not only triangulate where the IP addresses of where people are jerking off to her, but threatening them with blackmail of $1000 if they don’t want their wives to find out. Somehow this makes her the heroine of this story.
However, she soon gets close to one of her regulars, a female voice that reveals that she owns a tech company called Neuranx and if she can share her life with Arianna, she’ll pay her $2,000 a minute. One assumes this is way better than working for tips and domming guys on a cam site. In a few days, she has over $60,000 and feels like life is turning around. If you’ve watched enough Lifetime movies, you know that now is when this secret woman is about to be taken out.
Yes, the secret woman is Olivia X (Olivia Day), the co-owner of Neuranx with her husband Ryan (Chase Anderson). After Detective Choi (Kurt Yue) barely listens to her claiming she watched Olivia get attacked and dragged away, Arianna decides to go apply for a job there, as if she were Halle Berry in Perfect Stranger. Lana (Christie Leverette) sees through her fake resume, but she’s also sleeping with Ryan and just may want to escape the strangeness of this company. And maybe Olivia really isn’t gone but more Gone Girl.
Nearly every man in this movie other than the police officer is scum, including Professor Edwards (David Arrow). While Arianna is literally a hacker beyond anybody in our reality, she’s also dumb enough to reveal her secret online identity of Angel to everyone who shouldn’t know it, from the Professor to Ryan to probably even her insane sister (I have no idea how a car accident makes you flip out because someone won’t play chess with you, but I’ve learned to just go with what these movies give me).
Director Jason Winn and writer Jackie Logsted (Rush for Your Life) have adapted one of my favorite movie-isms here. Instead of the exotic dancer heroine who never gets naked or the sex worker who never has sex, we now get the cam girl who keeps mostly clothed and even takes off her mask like Tim Burton Batman and by that I mean at the worst times when talking to the worst people who should not know who she is under that disguise.
Also: My wife came downstairs in the middle of this, saw the title and shot me the look. So yeah, I got in as much trouble for watching this as I would have for watching Emanuelle In America. This movie is no Joe D’Amato, so the level of annoyance from her was not worth the dearth of depravity that I was given in this film. I’m not expecting a snuff orgy — only D’Amato would randomly drop that on you in a movie you’re watching on Cinemax when you’re 15 and you go from early puberty charged up to suddenly freaked out — but if you’re going to get me in trouble make it worth it.
Lyla starts with a young boy running over a Mego Invisible Woman figure over and over again with a reflective toy care. Then his mother appears and tells him that things are going. to be different now that she has to leave. He begs her to stay and she reminds him that she will always love him before slicing open her own throat and bleeding all over the wallpaper.
Hugh (Clark Moore) takes his wife Lyla (Jolene Andersen) and son Lars (Mason Wells) on a getaway so that he can have the solitude that he needs to write his first book. As you can imagine, seeing that this is a horror movie, that escape from the distractions of modern society is short-lived. Have we learned nothing from every other writer who has tried to do the same and found strange people and familiar ghosts out to destroy not only his family but himself too?
Director and writer Gordon Cowie has only made this one film and it looks gorgeous. He definitely has skills as a cinematographer and unlike so many direct to streaming movies, this actually looks like a movie where someone has taken the time to make the colors rich, to think through the shots and to push things beyond just pointing and shooting.
As for what it’s all about, I watched it twice and went back a few times to review things and I wonder if I’ve made it more complicated than it is. I didn’t want to be one of the other people I’ve seen review this on Letterboxd and go off on it, because hey, I’ve watched enough giallo to make my way around a confusing narrative. Yet Lyla is so obtuse at times that I honestly can’t tell you where the story begins or ends.
That said, it has one of the most beautiful depictions of someone smashing someone else’s head with a rock on a wave swept beach I’ve seen, so there’s that, right?
In the seventh installment of Cybela Clare’s explosive series of alien exposes, Peabody Award-winning journalist Linda Moulton Howe, JFK experts Robert Morningstar and Jim Marrs, and psychic CEO Sebastien Martin have come together to explain why President John F Kennedy was killed.
One reason may be that he wanted to share the government’s most highly classified secret with the American people. That’s right. Kennedy wanted to tell everyone about aliens.
Ten days later after he made this decision, he was assassinated. Partially burnt documents, rescued from the fireplace of deceased counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton are the proof.
Or so this movie says.
I’ve watched so many documentaries about Kennedy and this reminds me of when I read William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, the book from which it seems so many conspiracy theories have come. Cooper wrote that Kennedy was assassinated because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were in the process of taking over the Earth, so he was killed by William Greer, the driver of the presidential limousine using a gas-powered device. He even said that the Zapruder film shows Greer turning to look into the back seat of the vehicle before firing the fatal shot.
As for Cooper himself, he went on to claim that the U.S. government had carried out the Oklahoma City bombing and was using remote mind-control devices to establish the New World Order. He also felt that he was being personally targeted by President Bill Clinton and the Internal Revenue Service. In 1998, federal authorities charged Cooper with tax evasion and bank fraud. They waited three years to serve him, as they were worried about what would happen.
In November of 2001, a 17-officer operation started with two sheriff’s deputies trying to lure Cooper away from his home and stockpile of weapons. When they identified themselves, he opened fire and almost made in back inside his house before he was shot and killed.
Cooper’s theory of JFK was even used in an episode of The X-Files, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man,” which used his phrase silent weapons for quiet wars. Depending on how deep you go, that could be disinfo. This documentary could be too.
Hans Holzer’s The Amityville Curse was one of several books that the author and parapsychologist wrote about 112 Ocean Avenue (Murder In Amityville, Amityville II: The Possession and The Secret of Amityville are the others). They’re based on the time that he and spiritual medium Ethel Meyers spent in the house. She claimed that it had been built on top of an ancient Native American burial ground and the angry spirit of Shinnecock Indian Chief Rolling Thunder was the entity that had possessed Ronald Defeo Jr. when he killed his family.
This claim was denied by the Amityville Historical Society, as the Montaukett Indians, were the actual tribe that settled the area.
That didn’t stop Holzier from writing more books.
In 1990, The Amityville Curse was filmed as part of a series of Canadian Amityville movies. After purchasing a property in Amityville, Debbie and Marvin invite three of their closest friends to help renovate the place. Of course, things go horribly wrong and nearly everyone dies. I’d recommend all three of these films, which also include Amityville: A New Generation and Amityville: It’s About Time over any of the modern cash-in Amityville movies.
Now, Tubi has purchased a remake of The Amityville Curse from Incendo, the same folks who made Terror Train for the network. It was also produced by author — and Hanz’s daughter — Alexandra Holzer, who they said is contributing to the movie to pay “tribute to continuing the authenticity and legacy of her father’s work.”
She appears in the new series Amityville: An Origin Story as well as The Holzier Files, Shattered Hopes: The True Story of the AmityvilleMurders and Famously Haunted: Amityville which is also on Tubi.
The movie begins with Mrs. Moriarty (Felicia Shulman) leaving a note and hanging herself. The movie jumps to three months later and a group of young people moving into the Amityville house. Billie Montenouvo (Mercedes Morris), Abigail Blaine (Tommie-Amber Pirie), Debbie Klein (Vanessa Smythe) and Lucy Davis (Jenny Raven) are trying to fix up the property and flip it so they can all make money. Debbie is the most driven of them and minutes after starting to unpack, she’s nearly killed by a falling mirror that Abigail shoves her out of the way of.
Lucy is obsessed with the history of the house, often listening to podcasts about what happened to the previous owners. Billie refuses to believe in ghosts while the others are open minded. That said, these girls are going to kill each other before the house gets fixed up.
When Abigail goes downstairs to fix a short, she freaks out when Frank (Dillon Casey) surprises her. They’re a couple but Billie and Lucy are, as are Debbie and Marv (Michael Xavier), a professor. But back to Frank. Why would he try to freak out his girlfriend in the infamous red room of the house? Why would you get high down there?
Meanwhile, Debbie falls over some books. You shouldn’t be clumsy in a haunted house.
You should also not have sex dreams about your friend’s boyfriend, as Abigail has a fantasy of Marv and sees Debbie show up with a shotgun. Then Frank comes back for another jump scare. Don’t get too attached to him, because he shows up dead at his own hand pretty quickly. Lucy wonders if it was the house,
Then, everyone discusses their finances. I am watching an Amityville movie that makes me consider that I won’t have this mortgage paid off until I am 78 years old. I will be dead and haunting this house before that happens.
After all this tragedy, why would Abigail allow podcaster Ben Holloway (Kenny Wong) to be in the house? This house is his holy grail and after all that drama, Debbie tells Abigail that she and Marv are fighting. The house is trending on Ben’s show Haunted Holloway, which isn’t helping anyone if they want to make enough money to sell this house. Everyone decides to let Ben stay and learn more about the house, but within like an hour he’s running in fear. And then a car hits him. Then he’s dead.
Lucy and Billie are fighting over the restaurant they own, adding more financial issues to this movie. The voices get to Billie, who decides to get into the bathtub fully clothed and bring a hairdryer into the water. Everyone breaks the door down and they find her dead.
So we have a podcaster down, two of the friends and no one is just leaving the house behind. This all proves to me that this is an Amityville movie. I would assume at any time they will either grab a spirit board or call a priest.
This is also very close to the idea of the original movie, except that no one has been killed with a nailgun yet. Also: nailguns are horrible weapons that don’t work like they do in the movies.
Reverend Marion (Ennis Esmer) shows up to tell Lucy that the soil outside is contaminated by all the Satanic rituals that happened in the past. She worries that Billie’s soul is trapped in the house, so he gives her a cross and starts going through the house and leaving symbols in chalk on the walls.
Meanwhile, Marv refuses to believe in the occult, even after three people have died — two on the same day — in the house. Then, you know, you’ve got a priest on a ladder writing on the walls while the lights are flicking on and off. A priest telling a bunch of scared people that the devil himself is toying with them before writing “die die die” on the walls and falling off a stepstool and snapping his leg like Sid Vicious when he jumped off the middle rope during the WCW Sin PPV.
Oh man — that’s when it all comes out, that Marv used to date Abigail before Debbie — who at the time of this revelation is looking at a cartoon drawing of Ron Defeo Jr. killing his family while a voice says “second best” — accuses them of having an affair and starts playing with a knife which she uses to slice her stomach open. And…she’s dead.
At times, this movie looks way too brightly lit with way too sharp digital camera work and other times, it appears to look like an honest to goodness film. Contrast the look of Debbie stabbing herself with the graveyard scene directly after, which looks really blue in tone and really gorgeous. It doesn’t seem to go together well, to be honest, but I notice this often in modern films, particularly streaming ones.
That’s when Doctor Harrison Cole (Brendan Fehr, Roswell, Final Destination), who Marv has battled and called a ghostbuster, comes to help with a seance and as you can imagine, Marv gets possessed by the house. Harrison keeps telling them it’s not a demon, even when it’s strangling him, but if a group of people were ever less prepared to fight the forces inside this house, I haven’t seen them.
That’s when Marv runs outside and near instantly finds a skull with a stab wound in it. Somehow, that causes Marv and Abigail to come together — literally — to hook up in the kitchen, getting caught by Lucy. The two have a woman to woman conversation about it before going to the cemetery to talk to Billie as she lies in the grave, telling her that she’s closing their restaurant.
Somehow, this brings Dr. Cole back, who gets to hear Marv speak in a demonic voice just as Abigail finds that letter that was being written — from the Moriarty family — at the beginning of the movie. As they read “This house killed my husband. It’s finally killed me…it will kill you too,” you can see Dr. Cole try to warn them just as he brains the college parapsychologist with a shovel, telling them to call 911. The phones don’t work because, well, this is Amityville.
I did laugh out loud when Lucy is stuck trying to keep Marv out while Abigail pours paint thinner all over the house to set it on fire. He’s outside screaming like Marky Mark in Fear while Abigail runs around. She yells for Abigail to get back. Abigail says, “We need to burn this house to the ****ing ground!” and just goes off while poor Lucy looks back and yells, “***k you you ****ing bitch! No one ever listens to me!” It’s the most real part of this entire movie and exactly what would happen, an honest bit of just plain frustration in the face of dealing with home improvement and the supernatural danger all around them.
Marv somehow just teleports into the house and sends Lucy into the basement, where she can hear her dead lover calling to her. At the same time as she struggles to release her, Marv is throwing Abigail all over the house and speaking in a demon voice and flickering like a post-J horror ripped off for America possessed person. She reponds by treating him like a Fulci victim — we don’t see the gore — and as he comes down the steps after her, she whac-a-moles him with a sledgehammer and then we get the squirting blood and some fun sound design. But ah, it’s all a ruse, as everyone in the house has gone to the side of the devil.
The movie closes at the graves — I won’t tell you who lives — with a discussion between the survivor and the limping priest. He asks why they stayed. The reply? “Because there’s nothing wrong with the place. It’s just a ****ing house.” The priest gets in the car and Dr, Cole says, “That house must be destroyed.” He’s still alive, somehow, and so is the priest, so are we getting Amityville: A New Generation2023?
Because as you know, the devil has me in a curse where I must watch every Amityville movie.
Directed by Eric Tessier and written by Dennis Heaton (who also wrote Fido), this is actually just fine. But seriously, at this stage of the game, if you’re making an Amityville movie, you need to be more than fine. You need to reclaim whatever this franchise — is it even a franchise? — is and go absolutely wild. The only movies that feel like they’ve done this in the series are my beloved Amityville II: The Possession, a bit of Amityville 3D, Amityville: It’s About Time— I could almost use that title now to describe how these movies have been now instead of then, it’s about time for a good one! — and the In the Hood films.
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