MY CALL: With extra hokey death scenes and some passable gore make-up, this most ambitious sequel of the franchise is still just worthy of a giggly Bad Movie Night. MORE MOVIES LIKE Amityville 1992: Uhhhhhh, when it comes to Amityville sequels, I’d stick to Amityville II: The Possession (1982) and otherwise tread carefully into the depths of the extended franchise. Part II has all the dumb fun you’re looking for with great pacing, but Amityville 3-D (1983) and Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes (1989) are both boring slogs. Definitely skip The Amityville Curse (1990), the worst of the first five Amityville movies. Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992) is marginally better than Curse. Amityville Dollhouse (1996) is a solidly fun bad movie, but it truly has nothing to do with Amityville (it is neither sequel nor spin-off, it just has a similar theme and uses “Amityville” in the title for literally no good reason).
More EVIL MIRROR movies: For more evil mirror movies try Mirrors (2008), Mirrors 2 (2010), Oculus (2014), Into the Mirror (2003) or Mirror Mirror 1-2 (1990, 1994). But I’d skip Mirror (2014).
I’m pretending that The Amityville Curse (1990) didn’t happen. So, after the slaughter of now two different families, a botched paranormal investigation and exorcism in the house, and a cursed yard sale lamp and clock (brought across the country to two different houses) to raise Hell, we now have… wait for it… yet another cursed object from the original house! This time a mirror!
The very first images to curse the screen in this movie is of the mirror’s sculpted demonic frame… which could have been made by a middle school art student. It’s farcically bad. I didn’t know an evil spirit would be willing to inhabit something so mediocre.
A homeless man gives Keyes (Ross Partridge) this cursed mirror in exchange for his charity. With his girlfriend Lanie (Lala Sloatman; Watchers) not so impressed with the mirror, they give it to their neighbor Suki (Julia Nickson). This comes just in time as Keyes and his artist conclave neighbors (incl. Richard Roundtree) plan to assemble an art show with their landlord’s (David Naughton; An American Werewolf in London) permission. So, in the interest of a low budget, the movie takes place in this apartment building.
The first death scene is not promising. Suki’s troublesome boyfriend (Robert Rusler; A Nightmare on Elm Street part II, Vamp, Sometimes They Come Back) sees his reflection in the mirror being mutilated, and then he panics and crashes his head through a window… which cuts his throat and face in as unspectacular manner as one could imagine. I want to be clear here, we watched him break a window to his head, fall to the ground, and die instantly from the cuts. This was less fun than watching footage of someone slip and fall on Instagram.
Meanwhile Keyes has nightmares of the original Amityville house, a detective (Terry O’Quinn; The Stepfather 1-2, Silver Bullet) starts looking into the recent deaths in the building, Suki becomes fascinated with the mirror and starts painting demons, and some rotoscoped bad-FX demon escapes from one of her paintings. The second death scene claims Suki in, again, an extremely uninspired (truly dull) death scene involving a noose. You could even see her pulse even after she was supposed to be long dead. I’m reminded of my friends’ homemade films from high school. Sigh…
Oh, but there’s a twist! Apparently, the homeless man who gave Keyes the mirror was THE killer in The Amityville Horror (1979) house from Keyes’ nightmares aaaaand that he was Keyes’ father! This should be cool. But it falls completely flat. I couldn’t have cared less. Funny, though, how we learn (from Lin Shaye; Abbatoir, The Grudge, Critters, Insidious 1-5, A Nightmare on Elm Street) that the Amityville house contents went to auction, as if to elegantly connect the 1979 original, this sequel, and the 5th and 6th Amityville movies together… you could call this anthology The Amityville Yard Sale. Some of the flashbacks’ Amityville family mythology-building smacked of A Nightmare on Elm Street parts 4-5, even if of far lower quality.
The death scenes are not all worthless, though. Some gunshots to the face and chest (re-enacting the original Amityville mass murder) were quite graphic. Some additional mutilated make-up work peppered in more acceptable effects as well. There’s also an incredibly ridiculous and satirical scene involving what art critics considered to be outstanding performance art. Just another dumb scene; but worthy of a chuckle and an eyeroll.
Director John Murlowski juuust might have bitten off more than he could chew. This movie had distinctly weak writing behind a wonderfully big idea to connect many Amityville films together more than any of the other sequels ever dared to consider. And that is admirable. However, the result was no fine film at all, but a bad movie. A delightfully bad movie!
