Tuesday, October 1, 2019

October Horror Challenge 2019 #2: "Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes"






One of the more unfortunate rules that I have for the October Horror Challenge is that once I start watching a movie, I *have* to finish it. I started this rule because I can watch 15 minutes of a movie, hate it, pick another movie, watch 15 minutes, hate it, then repeat this cycle 4567543356 times and waste a zillion hours, and I just don't have time for that when I'm trying to cram 100+ movies into one month. I also find myself sometimes judging a movie too harshly at the beginning, deciding that it will suck, only to find after awhile that it's actually better than I gave it a chance to be.

I say this rule is unfortunate because sometimes a movie really DOES suck and I am correct in my judgment. Also, sometimes, I don't realize I've seen a movie until after watching it for awhile. That was the case with this movie, and sadly, not only have I seen this movie before, but it's also TERRIBLE and now I'm stuck watching the fucking thing AGAIN.

In my defense, this movie poster doesn't give a hint as to the actual movie it's supposed to represent. It also doesn't list any of the stars in the movie, and I'd have known which movie it was as soon as I saw that Patty Duke was in it. Yes, she's a pretty good actress. No, that doesn't help the movie not suck. Also, there are about a trillion Amityville movies, and I haven't seen many of them, and this movie doesn't even have the decency to mention that it's part 4 of the series, which also would have tipped me off that this was the horrendous entry in the series about the haunted lamp.

No, I'm not making that up. This movie is actually about a haunted lamp from the original Amityville house that gets sold in a yard sale and brings the evil of that house to whoever is unfortunate enough to buy the lamp. I wonder if all the other appliances from the house carry the same evil with them? Does someone out there wind up with an evil blender? That would probably be better than this movie.

So if we pretend this movie has a plot, it's about a little girl whose mother takes her and her siblings to live with grandma after her father dies, and unfortunately grandma has just gotten a lamp as a gift, and that lamp is from the evil Amityville house, so it brings evil with it and tries to corrupt the little girl and steal her soul. Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds. There's practically no budget so the effects are ridiculous (there's a hand injury that has to be seen to be believed...seriously,  if I told you what happened you wouldn't believe me). The acting is pretty bad. Patty Duke is good, but the movie is so stupid that it doesn't matter. The little girl manages to be creepy sometimes, but she can't save the movie with her creepiness. All in all, this movie bites, and I wish I'd never watched it once, let alone twice.

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