Director: Tom Berry
Writers: Hans Holzer, Michael Krueger
Stars: Kim Coates, Dawna Wightman, Helen Hughes
Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/36ppkY5
Synopsis
An old priest leaves the church and goes to take confession. We hear Latin being spoken as the credits roll. The confessional shakes and something explodes. They pack up all the dead priest’s things.
Twelve years later, Debbie and Marvin, a young couple who are house hunting stop in front of an old house that’s for sale. She keeps repeating that “I know this house. I’ve seen this house before in a dream.” The house is a fixer-upper, and he buys it thanks to his business partner and his wife. The four move in quickly. This is really obviously not the same house from any of the other movies, as it’s made of red brick.
The five adults decide to spend the night there, even though the power doesn’t work. One woman gets her foot stuck in the floor, and the other cuts her hand on broken glass. Debbie keeps sayin that she senses something in the house, but Marvin is a psychiatrist, and he thinks she’s just a little goofy. Debbie wakes up in the middle of the night and sees some strange things. She finds an old confessional that spits out smoke. It attacks her, and she wakes up; it was a dream. Probably.
A strange old woman walks in the front door and offers to help Debbie. She’s Mrs. Moriarty, who used to houseclean for the old dead priest from the pre-credit sequence. Debbie keeps seeing a boy and his dog outside, but the boy seems to keep disappearing. They find the priest’s stuff in the basement. Debbie sees the boy hanging from a tree in the yard. Meanwhile, someone pushes Mrs. Moriarty down the basement steps.
The detective investigating her death explains that the old house used to be the church rectory. He also explains how the priest was murdered in the church around the corner, but the property of the priest went into their basement. Someone shot the priest right between his eyes. The murder was blamed on a simple kid who hung himself from their tree. They were never sure that the boy did the murder.
Marvin finally starts to believe Debbie when he reads her journal. We get a flashback to find out who killed the priest and why.
Commentary
This house doesn’t bear any resemblance to the house in any of the other movies; they didn’t even bother licensing the exterior shots or the memorable window structure that makes the house recognizable. There’s no special connection to anything else Amityville either. It’s got a pretty involved plot, and it’s not bad in itself, but it’s got nothing to do with Amityville.
At one point when they’re unloading the car, a character makes an observation, “So this is Amityville, huh?” and an old man in the bar mentions “That boy who killed his family.” That’s pretty much it. It’s like they had a generic ghost story / haunted house film, and they decided what to name it based on what was popular at the time and then filmed one scene and dubbed in another line to make it fit.
The beginning starts out as a haunted house story, and by the end it’s a whodunit, and toward the very end, it’s a slasher type film. This one is all over the place. It’s actually not as bad as I made it sound, but it’s far from the best Amityville film.