- Directed by Tony Randel
- Written by John G. Jones, Christopher DeFaria, Antonio Toro
- Stars Stephen Macht, Shawn Weatherly, Megan Ward, Damon Martin
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 35 minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGcBqiKL5uI
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Bad things happen because of a clock from Amityville because of reasons. It’s got some interesting ideas here and there, but it’s unexplained and fairly random. There is a story and some characters you kind of care about, but it’s not a great sequel. In fact it’s so thinly connected to the first movies that it’s a stretch to call it a sequel.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open in the Phase Two models of Burlwood Estates. It looks more like the neighborhood from “Poltergeist” than the one from “The Amityville Horror.”
Jacob comes home; he’s an architect that is somehow involved in the project. He just bought an antique clock that the whole family thinks is creepy. “It came from one of those houses we tore down for the development.” A creepy old woman outside sees the house change into the “Amity House” for a moment.
Andrea isn’t the kids’ mother, she was just there to watch them while Jacob was out of town. Jacob invites her to spend the night. She’s seeing Leonard, but Jacob is very persuasive; they have the sweatiest sex ever.
Downstairs, the clock does something strange involving a drill and razorlike knives. Peaches the dog doesn’t like the clock and barks angrily, so the son, Rusty puts her back outside in the rain. Rusty flips a light switch and their modern living room becomes a torture chamber.
It’s awkward in the morning when Andrea is still there to see the kids off. Jacob goes for a run but is attacked by the vicious Peaches the dog, who isn’t their dog. He’s badly injured, but also does some real damage to the dog. We cut to Andrea in the hospital afterward. The doctor treats Andrea like Jacob’s wife, and she doesn’t appreciate that.
Rusty skips school to play chess with Iris, the neighbor who watched the building change last night. He tells her what he saw. “It’s very old and it’s traveled a long way,” she says.
Andrea and Rusty go to see the dog’s owner, and the dog is just fine. That wasn’t Peaches who attacked Jacob. Rusty tries to tell Andrea about the weird room-switcharoo, but she doesn’t listen. Rusty experiences another time shift, about three hours.
Lisa offers to give Andrea her room, while Lisa sleeps in the living room. At 3 a.m., something invisible crawls into bed with Andrea. Andrea imagines seeing some kind of blood-monster in her bed and then lets Lisa out of the living room.
Peaches the dog is killed that night, and the police come looking for Rusty. Meanwhile, Jacob is obsessed with drawing the original Amityville house and clocks. The police want to know about Rusty’s friends, but Rusty isn’t cooperative.
Andrea’s real boyfriend, Leonard, comes over with food. Leonard has Andrea and Jacob’s relationship completely figured out, and Andrea agrees with him. As they talk, the neighbor’s hedges catch on fire. Rusty’s inside playing guitar, so he has no idea what’s going on– and no alibi. Leonard wants, no insists, that Andrea needs to get out of there.
Leonard goes downstairs and runs into Jacob, who isn’t really Jacob, who talks about hurting people before pulling out a pistol. Then he vanishes into thin air. Leonard is not happy. Lisa looks at herself in the mirror, but the mirror version does things differently from the real one.
Morning comes, and Lisa dresses all slutty; she’s changed since last night. Rusty goes to see Iris, and she believes him. He describes the torture chamber she saw in the living room. She shows him a picture of the room in a book. It was the home of a fifteenth-century child murderer and cannibal place. She opens up her book on Amityville and sees the clock in a picture from there.
Through a weird series of coincidences, Iris is impaled by a diaper truck mascot. Rusty goes through her things, and he sees the pictures of the Amityville clock. That’s when the police arrest him.
Lisa lures her boyfriend into the basement and has him get undressed. He melts into the floor, screaming all the way down. Upstairs, Leonard takes a bath, but it’s all black sludge. It only goes downhill from there. In the main bedroom, Jacob wakes up, and he looks possessed.
Andrea sees something scary in Jacob’s office before she finds Leonard’s body hanging from a wire. Rusty comes from nowhere and tells Andrea about the Amityville Clock. Rusty goes looking for Lisa, but all the doors and windows are sealed. Jacob attacks Andrea, throwing her through the wall while sister Lisa tries to seduce her brother Rusty upstairs. Things are all getting very hectic until Andrea stabs Jacob in the dog bite until he passes out.
Andrea notices that Rusty is now a baby. The clock did something to him by running backward. He escapes out the front door. Andrea goes to smash the clock, but she finds gears inside the walls instead– the whole house is now the clock. She turns on the gas fireplace as the clock runs forward and ages her. Andrea, now looking a hundred years old, lights a match and the house explodes, throwing the clock into another dimension.
Andrea wakes up, clean and uninjured. Jacob’s at the door. He’s just come home from his trip, and he’s brought an antique clock that he’s just bought. Andrea smashes it to the ground, shocking the rest of the family. She grabs her overnight bag and leaves.
None of it happened. Or did it?
Commentary
This was the last Amityville Horror movie in the series based on a book. The actor who played Rusty looked like he was about forty and playing a high school kid– I was not convinced. The music box tune that kept playing got annoying really fast.
OK, so there’s this haunted clock. Why is the clock haunted? Why is it doing any of this stuff? A lot of bad, weird stuff happens, but at no point do we ever really know why.