Amityville: Evil Never Dies

This film essentially begins with a woman by the name of "Mrs. Pangborn" (Sheri Lee) presenting a birthday cake to her teenage son and daughter. While she's doing this, her husband "Senator Ty Pangborn" (Dan Mauro) comes downstairs dressed in a clown costume and proceeds to murder all three of them with a shotgun before taking his own life. The scene then shifts to a week later with two young men and a woman breaking into the house and attempting to steal a picture of a clown which was supposedly taken from the original haunted house in Amityville. While trying to do so, however, a clown materializes and murders them all. After that, the scene then shifts once again to a man by the name of "Ben" (Ben Gothier) buying a toy monkey at a small shop and taking it home. But what neither Ben nor his wife "Michelle" (Michelle Muir-Lewis) realize is that this toy monkey was also taken from the same haunted house in Amityville, and it is possessed by an evil spirit which intends to kill both of them. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that the director (Dustin Ferguson) borrowed heavily from his earlier film "Amityville Toybox" produced about a year earlier. To that effect, not only did he feature the same toy monkey, but he also replayed several scenes from that earlier picture as well. Talk about a complete lack of imagination. Yet as dull as the plot turned out to be, the main problem with this movie concerned the extremely poor audio technique. More specifically, at times the audio was so low that it was difficult to hear what the characters were saying. At other times, the background music drowned out the dialogue completely. Not that it really mattered because there really wasn't anything here to arouse that much interest anyway. Be that as it may, although I very seldom give a film the lowest mark possible, I have to say that this particular movie is a rare exception to that rule--it's just that bad.

Dustin Ferguson makes about a dozen movies a year, which seems really impressive until you actually watch one of them. It's tough to call what he does filmmaking. He basically sells footage to bottom feeders like Tubi. He turns on his consumer-grade camera and mostly just points it at stuff. I can't imagine this movie even had a script. There's a very rough outline and the actors just kinda figure things out as it goes along. That worked really well for "Blair Witch". This isn't "Blair Witch".

Low-budget movies usually tend to waste some time. Cheap horror movies that are all killer no filler are few and far between. Not everyone has the talent or resources to make the new "Evil Dead", and we accept that. Sometimes a walking/driving scene can go on for way too long in a thinly-veiled attempt to boost the running time, and we just kinda smile. That's fair. However, I don't think I've ever seen someone pad the running time so cynically and blatantly. "Amityville: Evil Never Dies" starts with two scenes that were clearly shot for a different movie, has the slowest credit sequences in cinema (ahum) history and gives us riveting scenes like a character walking to a park, sitting on a bench, making a drawing and walking back home. Of course the drawing or the park have absolutely no bearing on the plot, what a silly thing to ask. What do you think this is, a movie?

Granted, this is nothing new. While Ferguson himself claims inspirations by Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, in reality he's much more related to Jerry Warren. Warren was a prolific director in the 50s and 60s, but basically all he did was buy up obscure foreign films, chop them up, add just a bare minimum of footage with American actors and pretend it was a coherent movie. Much like Ferguson, he churned out products with no regard for quality or entertainment value. The main difference between Warren and Ferguson is that Warren was brutally honest about this in interviews. He knew he was a glorified con artist and never tried to convince us he was trying to make the new "Texas Chain Saw Massacre". Ferguson doesn't even give us that courtesy and tries to convince us he's making homages to his favorite movies. If you're making me defend Jerry Warren, you may not be very good at your job.

The most bothersome thing about productions like this is how they make it increasingly difficult to find a diamond in the rough. There are (probably) some promising directors out there who try to get a head start with a micro-budget horror flick, much like Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson did before them. I want to see these movies, but they're between hundreds of films by people who don't give a damn and are there for a quick buck. Even video stores, notorious for how much crap they had on the shelves, had much better ratios than that. If you genuinely love horror movies, for the love of God don't make them look like this. It's just going to turn people away from giving micro-budget horror a chance.

I wrote this review originally, but I no longer use that account, so I will have to rewrite it:

I don't recall seeing any scary clowns in this movie. I think there was one clown right at the beginning that didn't have anything to do with the story, what little there was of it. And that was about it. There was not a clownhouse full of clowns, and it certainly wasn't an Amityville house full of clowns. For that matter, it wasn't even an Amityville house. What in the world is going on here?

Okay ... let's suss this out. The title of the movie is "Amityville Clownhouse." I've got that much. So, to wit ...

1. In a Clownhouse, you would expect a house that is full of clowns. Furthermore, being a movie that is labeled a "Horror" movie, you would expect a house full of murderous clowns with terrifying makeup, similar to the clown on the poster. Right? Well ... wrong. That is not in this movie. There is no clownhouse, and there are no terrifying clowns. Basically, there are NO clowns to speak of.

2. In an Amityville movie, you would expect an Amityville-looking house, buuuuut ... NO! You would be wrong there, as well. There is no Amityville house at all. And the house that IS there does not have clowns in it, so not only is it NOT a clownhouse, as previously mentioned, but it is not even an Amityville house, so the title is a big, old misdirection, as are the reviews that give this laughable attempt at a movie anything more than a 1/10.

In conclusion, I honestly don't know what this is supposed to be, but it isn't what the title says it is in the least. What I would have named it is ... "Boring, Tedious, Terribly Directed & Acted Waste of Time." That would have been entirely accurate. Too bad, also, because something really cool could have been made from the title, "Amityville Clownhouse," alone. What a shame. What a darn, shame of a missed opportunity. :(

This movie made me dumber watching it and it gave me eye cancer

I don't recall seeing any scary clowns in this movie. I think there was one clown right at the beginning that didn't have anything to do with the story, what little there was of it. And that was about it. There was not a clownhouse full of clowns, and it certainly wasn't an Amityville house full of clowns. For that matter, it wasn't even an Amityville house. What in the world is going on here?

Okay ... let's suss this out. The title of the movie is "Amityville Clownhouse." I've got that much. So, to wit ...

1. In a Clownhouse, you would expect a house that is full of clowns. Furthermore, being a movie that is labeled a "Horror" movie, you would expect a house full of murderous clowns with terrifying makeup, similar to the clown on the poster. Right? Well ... wrong. That is not in this movie. There is no clownhouse, and there are no terrifying clowns. Basically, there are NO clowns to speak of.

2. In an Amityville movie, you would expect and Amityville-looking house, buuuuut ... NO! You would be wrong. There is no Amityville house at all. And the house that IS there does not have clowns in it, so not only is it NOT a clownhouse, as previously mentioned, but it is not even an Amityville house, so the title is a big, old misdirection.

In conclusion, I honestly don't know what this is supposed to be, but it isn't what the title says it is by one iota. What I would have named it is ... "Boring, Terribly Directed & Acted Waste of Time." That would have been entirely accurate. Too bad, too, because something really cool could have been made from that title alone. What a shame. What a darn shame. :(