“It’s like Vegas, baby: never bet against the house…”

 

Director:  Michael Angelo

Starring:  Nicole Tompkins, Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau, Amanda Barton, Kim Nielsen, Trevor Stines, Tonya Kay, Lai-Ling Bernstein, Christy St. John, Bobby Emprechtinger

Screenplay:  Amanda Barton

 

 

 

Synopsis:  Todd (Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau) and Jessica Jacobsen (Kim Nielsen), with their teenage daughter, Hailey (Nicole Tompkins), move to the small town of Amityville where they are to share a house with Todd’s sister, Shae (Amanda Barton), who is struggling after the death of their mother. Hailey is resistant to the arrangement, though Todd tries to encourage a positive mindset; assuring her, in any event, that the relocation is only a temporary measure. The house turns out to be a large Victorian property with an extensive garden, and furniture apparently left behind by the previous occupants. Shae reveals that she was able to rent the property for a surprisingly low amount. The family’s first night in the house takes a bad turn when Hailey resents what she views as Shae’s interference in her affairs and throws her situation as a recovering addict in her face. Immediately, the lights blow out: Todd goes looking for the fuse box while Hailey, fuming in the garden, is alarmed to see a shadowy figure in an upstairs window, which seems to be holding an axe… The next day, Hailey sets out to explore on her trail bike, and accidentally discovers the local teen hangout in the woods outside town. Brett (Trevor Stines) is welcoming, but Hailey attracts hostility from a trio of girls led by Theresa (Christy St. John); she also notices a strange reaction from the group when she reveals that she and her family have just moved into the house on Amity Way. At the house, property manager Delilah McCallister (Tonya Kay) drops by to pick up a cheque from Shae and meets Jessica; warning the two women that they are unlikely to make friends, as their neighbours tend to keep to themselves. Later, as Jessica is cleaning a doll she discovered buried in the garden, the drain backs up. Todd finds a product that unblocks it—but at the same time Shae, lying in her bath, begins to scream in agony. The others must force their way into her bathroom where they find her writhing on the floor, insisting that something was burning her skin off. However, she appears unharmed, prompting Hailey and Jessica to conclude that the episode was drug-related. Hailey starts school and immediately finds herself the target of bullying, though Brett tries to help. At his new job, Todd gets into conversation with his boss, Mike Arkos (Bobby Emprechtinger), who reacts with dismay at learning where the Jacobsens are living; he reveals that he and Shae were once an item. Hailey meets up with Brett and takes him for a ride on her bike. She complains to him about Shae’s behaviour, including her belief that she was being burned by acid—which prompts Brett to tell her about the notorious tragedy which once unfolded in her house, in which a boy killed his family…

Comments:  The slide of the Amityville franchise into cheap churn-’em-out direct-to-DVD pseudo-sequels continues with The Amityville Terror, which is another generic piece of work that has nothing to do with the original scenario—but which at least has the grace (unlike some of its preceding confrères) to serve up its horrors in a vague approximation of the original House.

 

If I’m inclined to react to this latest entry with some tepid positivity, it might be because it represents a significant step-up – at least in franchise terms – from the not-even-pretending-to-be-related Amityville: Vanishing Point, about which I’ll have a little – a very little – to say in the next Et Al. update. Though never remotely scary, The Amityville Terror does offer one or two well-staged sequences and some fairly impressive gore effects, though you have to wait nearly to the end for those; there’s also gratuitous nudity and a couple of tacky sex scenes, for those of you who like that sort of thing.

However, the first half hour – of a film only 84 minutes long – is a real slog, and in a manner that works against its overall success.

The Amityville Terror opens with a prologue that sort of evokes the original story, with a couple attempting to flee a house as it erupts around them in the familiar supernatural way. As they make it out the front door, a child’s voice calls out—and the woman hesitates, swinging around to confront the sight of a small boy with a bloody pentagram carved into his forehead. Though her husband insists that, “That’s not our son”, the woman cracks and rushes back to embrace the child. Over her shoulder, the boy’s face converts into that of someone much older, looking gloatingly at the man before the front door slams shut between them. When the man forces his way back in, he finds his wife hanging bloodily from the ceiling…

Then we meet our central characters—and the film’s problems start in earnest.

To cut to the chase, Hailey Jacobsen will turn out to be the protagonist of The Amityville Terror—eventually discovering the house’s history and fighting back against the entities that threaten her family.

However, she is introduced in full-on whiny negative teen mode, and will inflict that attitude upon her parents, her aunt and – worst of all – the viewer for a wearying chunk of the film. I can only suppose that screenwriter Amanda Barton wanted this to be Hailey’s journey, about her stepping up in the face of the increasing crisis, but it just makes us hate her at the outset.

Anyway, the Jacobsens are relocating to move in with Todd’s sister, Shae, who we are repeatedly told has “gone through a lot”, though the script never much expands on that.

Meanwhile, this time around “Amityville” is a small, fairly isolated, tacitly blue-collar town located…somewhere or other, I don’t think they’re ever clear on that point. This is at least a little less silly than the version of Amityville served up in Amityville Death House, but only by a whisker. The film also provides a house that acts as a reasonable substitute for the original, so that’s another point in its favour; though we suspect that the people who designed the DVD covers hadn’t actually seen the film.

(It was probably just a coincidence, but my first thought on laying eyes upon Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau was that he was meant to resemble George Lutz.)

On the other hand, the whole point of The Amityville Terror is that the house is a serial rental—and as depicted, we can think of very little reason why anyone would want to relocate to this version of Amityville, let alone “hundreds” of people as Hailey later declares.

 

As the Jacobsens drive towards their destination, Hailey begins endearing herself to us by moaning about everything. As she does so, we note that Amityville’s isolation is pretty much an Informed Attribute^©, as there is plenty of other traffic around, and indeed the family seems to end up driving through a fairly normal town, if not a thriving metropolis. Hailey’s specific complaint – “I see trees! Ooh, look, another tree!” – crimeny, girl, where did you grow up? – Deforestation AZ? – is eye-rollingly forced…and this is not the last time we’ll think that about the character.

(Later we learn via Hailey that the relocation is from San Francisco, but since we don’t know where “Amityville” is, it’s hard to know whether that’s a big deal or not.)

The house they are to share with Shae is located in a cul-de-sac, “Amity Way”, outside of the town itself. It’s an impressive property, though Hailey immediately complains about its evident age and its non-matching furniture—which Shae tells her reprovingly gives it “character”. The furniture, we gather, was left behind by various previous occupants, which strikes the Jacobsens as odd but convenient.

Shae shows the others around, and even Hailey struggles to find anything to bitch about in her hexagon-shaped, window-encircled room (albeit it has no equivalent on the outside of the house). Shae’s own room is a shambles, since she uses it as her artist’s studio; but Todd and Jessica approve the master-bedroom. Todd, indeed, immediately puts the moves on his wife, who puts him off on the grounds of the whole middle-of-the-day, sister-and-kid-around thing. “You’re never in the mood,” mutters Todd.

(The Jacobsens’ sexual dysfunction will be made use of later. My contribution is the observation that maybe Todd should occasionally try something other than kissing his wife’s shoulder: it appears to be his one and only move, and clearly we’re not dealing with Marge Simpson’s elbow here. Also, waiting until your wife is asleep seems like setting yourself up for failure.)

 

That night, over pizza, Hailey makes a successful pitch to have starting school delayed until the beginning of the next semester. Shae ventures a dissenting opinion, and Hailey turns on her furiously—among other things, throwing her past addiction in her face. This is presented here as alcohol abuse, though later Todd will assign a colourful array of drugs as his sister’s preference(s).

The lights blow out in the middle of the family ruckus. A still-fuming Hailey runs outside and, from the garden, sees a strange figure in an upstairs window—apparently a man holding an axe. And it is still there as a shadow when Todd fixes the fuse…

One of The Amityville Terror’s more irritating conceits appears the next morning when Todd finds Hailey practising with the small crossbow she likes to tote around: a totally normal thing for a teenager to do, which her parents would be totally down with. (And particularly odd, I would have thought, in someone who is clearly an urbanite.) By way of justification, we later get the following asinine exchange:

Local kid:  “Ever heard of a gun?”
Hailey:  “Guns are so predictable.”

But at least Amanda Barton understood the concept of Chekov’s Crossbow.

Another irritating conceit follows hard, as Hailey takes her trail bike out for a ride; and honestly, the thing is so obnoxiously loud, it comes across like she’s deliberately making as much noise as possible while tearing through the town. She ends up in the surrounding woods and, hearing music – somehow, over her own din – follows it to the local teens’ hangout.

She is met warmly by a boy called Brett, which immediately draws upon her the wrath of the local Mean Girls—none of whom look much like the product of the kind of town Amityville is supposed to be. Her reception is nasty enough for Hailey to take herself away again, though not before she reveals her address—and notices the exchange of looks and snickers amongst the teenagers.

 

Back at the house, we’ve seen Jessica planting roses (in completely inappropriate soil), digging up a buried baby doll, and poking around in the cellar; now we watch as Shae gets a visit from the manager of the property, Delilah McCallister, who vamps and smirks and sneers and generally calls attention to herself as the film’s overt human villain.

Todd arrives home from work to find Jessica trying to clean the doll, only to have her sink refuse to drain. He finds some chemical unblocker in the cellar, and it does the job—and from a nearby bathroom comes the sound of Shae screaming in agony…

Shae is played by screenwriter Amanda Barton: the showiest role in the film, if not the starring one; and I guess if she chose to give herself gratuitous nude scenes, we can’t really complain about it. This is the first of them, as – so it seems – the drain cleaner somehow backs up into Shae’s bath, eating away her skin like acid. As we see her raw and bloody, Shae screams and writhes and finally scrambles out of the tub—but when her family forces their way in, there is no sign of any injury, just a naked woman on the floor, still raving about the burning…

Jessica starts out blaming the drain cleaner but in the absence of any overt injury adopts Hailey’s suggestion of a drug-trip. She also accuses Todd of prioritising Shae over Hailey. He denies the latter—while conceding that Shae’s “freak-out” might have been the result of, “Acid, or peyote…”

There’s a bit of business with a music box that Hailey finds in the cellar mixed in here, but it never amounts to anything.

Hailey seems to have given up on the idea of delaying school and heads out for her first day. On her way out she encounters a neighbour kid, whose ball has rolled over the line dividing her house from the Jacobsens’—and who refuses to take a step to retrieve it. The kid goes on to tell Hailey about a girl called Rachel, who used to live there—and, she insists, still does. Disappointingly, this seeming promise of an inhabiting child-spirit is another touch that leads nowhere.

 

At school, Hailey immediately falls into the clutches of the Mean Girls; while we also hear about someone called Mia, who apparently hasn’t been seen since entering “the Amity house” on a dare.

The increasingly unstable Shae, meanwhile, comes across a doctor’s bag (a doctor’s zip-bag, anyway) in a closet, including a loose scalpel (!): the old-fashioned kind, with a detachable blade. (So why wasn’t it?) She immediately starts painting with the latter, putting a dramatic slash of red across a clean canvas.

At work, Todd discovers that his boss is “THAT Mike”, Shae’s old college boyfriend (who evidently didn’t think to ask, when he learned Todd’s name was “Jacobsen”). Mike is bothered by learning that Shae is living in the house on Amity Way, but doesn’t say why.

That night, Hailey takes Brett out for a ride on the back of her bike—and OMG something relevant finally happens—huzzah!

(Correction: thirty-five minutes into an 84-minute film.)

When Hailey tells Brett about Shae’s freak-out, he reacts visibly to her claim to have been exposed to acid. After some umm-ing and ahh-ing, he finally tells Hailey the history of the house: how a boy called Jimmy Oberest killed his family there, including his young sister by immersing her in a bathtub full of acid…

(…which is repeatedly called being drowned in acid, which I found unreasonably annoying…)

Meanwhile, at the house, Mike is knocking for admission with no response. He crosses to a window: he can see Jessica, though apparently she can’t hear him. Then he sees an underwear-clad Shae—and she smiles at him as she brandishes her scalpel behind Jessica’s back…

 

Mike’s next stop is the bar owned by Brett’s father, where he learns that Delilah is, “Screwing around in the kitchen”—literally, as it turns out. Neither she nor Mike sees any particular reason for her to stop what she’s doing as he explains that Shae is a friend of his, and demands that she gets the Jacobsens out of the house. He gets no joy, however: Delilah simply insists that the house cannot be empty…

Todd has an uncomfortable encounter with a fully naked Shae (I guess the qualifier there was unnecessary), which prompts him to put his signature move on a sleeping Jessica—astonishingly, to no effect.

Hailey is the next to invade Shae’s room, where she discovers her most recent canvas – Self-Portrait With Acid Burns, perhaps – and notes the medical bag that once belonged to Dr Willis R. Cranston; though at a sharp word from Shae, she puts down the scalpel. As Hailey departs, Shae attacks her verbally—hitting, we gather, all of her insecurities and weak spots, including her deepest fear: that her parents’ regret for the death of their second child, a boy, exceeds their love for her…

This scene, at exactly the halfway point of The Amityville Terror, I guess marks the turning point for Hailey, who increasingly assumes a more proactive role as she tries to determine the nature of the threat that might be confronting herself and her parents.

Unfortunately, this manifests in the first instance as a dream in which she is threatened by an axe-wielding Jimmy Oberest, and which climaxes in one of those silly wake-up-in-class-and-scream moments; though at least we know that, as late as 2016, people were still watching, and [*cough*] being inspired by, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

Hailey’s next stop is Google, where she first researches the murders: the mock-up newspaper here is truly terrible, spelling errors and all, but alas, they don’t give us a really good look at it. (I could swear I glimpsed a 1990 date on the paper, though the photos look a lot earlier). She then tries to track down Willis Cranston. She can find no record of him post-2004, but she does locate an online photo of the doctor and his family, in which his little girl is clutching the doll that Jessica dug up in the garden.

 

(Hilariously – and in a very rare instance of this film making contact with an earlier one in the franchise, accidentally or otherwise – the photo accompanies a short article about Dr Cranston organising a charity event; and like the coroner’s report in Amityville: A New Generation, it was CLEARLY not intended for the viewer to be able to read it. [Don’t strain your eyes, it’s down below.])

This interlude is broken up by a couple of sickly hilarious scenes involving Jessica and Todd, the former of whom mutilates herself on her own roses (is Jessica dumber than a hamster? – you better believe it), while the latter helps prove that welding sparks + leaking petrol = goodbye Mike.

There is no subsequent sign that Jessica was actually hurt, but Mike does seem to have succumbed to some wonderfully inadequate CGI flame effects; with Delilah wandering through the scene and smirking as he dies.

Hailey gets Mean Girled in the school ladies’ before running off to share her discoveries with Brett, such as they are, including her certainty that Dr Cranston once lived in her house. After this the two get cutesy, swapping stories of jamming guitar and what it’s like to have a dead family member (his mother, her brother), the latter leading to a brief snog. It also leads to Brett revealing that he knows someone who might be able to help.

That would be Jenny, a friend who is into protective charms and crystals. She recognises Hailey as one of the people who just moved into “the Amity house” and declines to get involved.

Earlier, we saw Todd drowning his sorrows at the bar after the whole my-boss-going-up-in-flames thing, where he also got hit on by Delilah with all her usual subtlety; though he managed to resist her extremely blatant charms.

 

When he gets home, he begins telling Jessica about the tragedy, to which she responds by observing that, “Accidents happen” and pushing her boobs in his face before, ahem, a quick kneel on the floor. A brief and extremely rough sexual encounter follows—and ends with Todd’s discovery, once he retreats upstairs, that Jessica is asleep in bed…

We’re led to believe that it was Shae downstairs, though Todd couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. Weird, isn’t it? – and by “weird” I mean really, really icky – how many films in this franchise have manufactured an excuse to revive the incest motif from Amityville II? (Myself, I’d’ve preferred it if they stuck with the puking priest…) Mind you— Shae spirals into a complete breakdown after this interlude, so I’m not sure that something worse isn’t being implied; that there wasn’t something else that Todd didn’t “see”.

Foolishly, to say the least, Jenny then weakens in her refusal to get involved in Hailey’s situation—finally agreeing to help on the proviso that no-one find out: “You know what would happen,” she says grimly to Brett. Hailey is still inclined to be facetious about it, but Jenny nevertheless sets about trying to make her bedroom a safe haven, not just for her but the whole family.

The house has other ideas, however: it fights Jenny’s attempt to place crystals around the room, rips away the large protective crystal she wears around her own neck so that it embeds itself in the ceiling, and finally tosses her through a window. Hailey, having herself been thrown out of the room with the door slammed in her face, rushes back in to find Jenny lying dead in the garden below, on her back and some distance from the house…

No-one in Amityville seems to treat this incident with any particular concern, as the Jacobsens notice to their alarm: the scene is cleaned up with a minimum of fuss, and the neighbours show a distinct tendency to shrug and move on. The Mean Girls, indeed, smirk in a satisfied way: “Looks like someone tried to help Failey bite off more than she could chew!” Whatever that means.

 

Since her room is not considered a potential crime scene or anything, Hailey returns to it and ends up pulling Jenny’s crystal out of the ceiling—subsequently wearing it bound around her wrist, as well as adopting a vaguely Goth-y wardrobe that seems to shock the staid residents of a burg where people die horribly on a regular basis because—

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Hailey also returns to her research, and succeeds in finding the contact details of someone she believes to be Dr Cranston’s brother. In a phone-call, she makes the medical bag her excuse for contacting him, but the conversation soon moves on to confirm that Willis went missing more than a decade before, and that the Amityville police, to whom his disappearance was reported, showed very little interest in the matter. It is also confirmed that Delilah was the property manager back then, too.

This revelation leads to Hailey breaking into Delilah’s house—making enough noise to wake the dead, if I’ll pardon my own expression, and toting around that stupid crossbow, which she has to put down to free up her hands while she’s jimmying open a locked filing cabinet. Inside she finds the records of everyone who has ever rented the house on Amity Way: all back-to-back over a period of years, but none of them staying in residence for more than three months…

Delilah catches Hailey at it, but she escapes easily enough with a clutch of the records. Her instinct is to take them to the police station, in spite of what David Cranston said; but she stops outside first to call her parents, telling them what she knows – though she thinks Delilah is the threat – and urging them to get out of the house.

So much she is allowed to say before the line drops out (?). She then successfully calls Brett (??), who tells her that the Oberests, collectively, were, “Into black magic” and, in pursuit of eternal life, succeeded in, “Opening a portal to hell.”

(HELL-OOO-OOO-OOO portal to hell! – it’s been a while…)

 

Brett also reveals that Delilah is the youngest of the Oberests, only a baby and sick in hospital when big brother Jimmy went on his acid-and-an-axe rampage.

Though he adds that there is, “So much more”, Hailey cuts Brett short when she sees two of Amityville’s finest dumping an occupied body-bag into the boot of their car. Rightly deducing that this is the unfortunate Jenny, she tells Brett tersely to meet her at the hangout in an hour and follows the cops undetected on her bike (no mean feat, given its noise-pollution-statute-shattering properties). Their destination is an unofficial cemetery where the body is interred.

Jessica, needing little urging from Hailey, is packing when she gets trapped in her room. As she cries out for Todd, someone starts hacking at the door with axe. It is Shae—white-paint-faced, psychotic, and possibly possessed by the spirit of Jimmy Oberest…

After the departure of the cops, Hailey investigates the cemetery and discovers, amongst the other markers, an open grave labelled “Jacobsen”. She is interrupted by sarcastic clapping, and finds herself confronted by the Mean Girls—and somewhat surprisingly, it falls to them to spell out the premise of the film:

Theresa:  “You were marked for death anyway… No-one who lives in the Amity house gets out alive. And if we don’t feed the house and keep the spirits happy, it comes for us.”

So we’re in one of those situations where an entire town is in on a conspiracy. There are some interesting touches here, including the relative recency of the key event, and some of the residents not merely acquiescing in but embracing the situation; but ultimately this explanation is simply thrust upon us, with no real use made of it as a framework. Nor do those “spirits” ever really manifest.

 

In fact, the lack of supernatural hocus-pocus here is this film’s biggest disappointment, particularly given the way the furniture was jumping around in the opening scene. Considering the amount of dead-time in the film’s first half, there was plenty of opportunity for the Jacobsens to experience some more appropriately Amityville-ish terrorisation before Shae’s breakdown / possession became the focus of its horror. I’m not saying that the threat of the axe isn’t franchise-appropriate – it totally is – but we want spooks along with it. I mean, there was supposed to be a portal to hell in the house, wasn’t there? And would an inexplicable fly manifestation kill ya?

Anyway— Hailey is understandably unmoved by Theresa’s rationalisation of why she has to die, and finally that stupid crossbow comes into play. At the last instant, Theresa drags Mean Girl #2 in front of herself and she takes Hailey’s shot directly in the eye.

Because of course she does.

“Holy shit,” exclaims Mean Girl #3 in dismay. “You know how she felt about her face!”

This unguarded reaction enrages Theresa so much, she dispatches #3 herself with a knife to the throat.

She then launches into a in-another-reality speech, though Hailey treats with contempt the idea that the two of them could ever have been friends. But it turns out that what Theresa thought the two of them had in common was Brett—whose severed head she now deposits at Hailey’s feet.

And can I just say, yay, Mean Girls! – because really, what the hell was up with Brett? As a resident of Amityville, he obviously knew about the whole feed-the-house thing, so surely he needed either to step out altogether or step up and persuade Hailey of the truth a lot earlier? – not arse around trying to be Mr Nice Guy Boyfriend—and, lest we forget, getting Jenny killed along the way by dragging her into Hailey’s business.

 

While Hailey is distracted by what’s left of Brett, Theresa launches herself at her—thus taking the crossbow out of play. The two have a fairly vicious one-on-one on the ground, with Hailey finally getting the upper hand; and in an uncomfortably impressive touch, she doesn’t stab Theresa so much as just slowly force the knife into her…

(Actually, I’m not sure it would have gone in where she’s pushing, but we won’t quibble.)

Hailey then heads for home, where everything seems dark and quiet—but she keeps her crossbow at the ready. She discovers her father dead on the stair landing, an axe wound in his head and bloody smears all the way down the wall. Her first thought is that Shae has done it – and in a sense, of course, she’s right – and after unleashing a scream of mingled rage and anguish, she presses on upstairs. There, she also finds her mother dead: not merely disembowelled but (in an impressive effect) almost exploded.

(Okay, I will quibble: I’m not sure how you’d do that with an axe…)

Transfixed with horror, Hailey does not at first notice that Shae is crouched in the corner of the room until she grabs her ankle and drags her to the floor, with an unintended shot from the crossbow going wide—leading Hailey to discover that while guns might be predictable, at least you don’t have to stop and reload them in between every shot while your hands are busy trying to keep an axe-wielding maniac at bay.

Shae consequently gets the best of things at first—and what would I not give for a moratorium on the villain lifting someone from the ground with one hand around their throat? However, as the two struggle, Shae’s other hand closes around Hailey’s wrist, where she is still wearing Jenny’s protective crystal, and with a howl she drops her victim, staggering back as that hand begins to smoke.

 

Hailey snatches up her crossbow and runs, with Shae tracking her through the house while calling out to her in the voice of Jimmy Oberest, I think. Hidden, Hailey unbinds the crystal from her wrist and straps it to the end of her next crossbow bolt. She then goes hunting for Shae / Jimmy—who crosses in front of the camera while we get a dramatic musical sting, speaking of things I’d like a moratorium on. She ends up standing behind Hailey, axe in hand, but kindly does nothing with it, granting Hailey the chance to swing around and let fly—with the crystal embedding itself in Shae / Jimmy’s forehead.

(Quibble, quibble, aerodynamics, quibble, quibble…)

Making sure of her kill – albeit taking time out for a, ahem, martial arts twirl – Hailey springs forward and slams the crystal more firmly home—leading to Shae / Jimmy being consumed by internal fire.

She then turns and flees; and we wait with confidence for the house to go up in flames and then explode for no readily apparent reason—

—and nothing happens.

Oh, come ON.

THAT’s what they called the moratorium on!?

I tell you…the young people of today have NO respect for the traditions of their elders…

 

Anyway. Hailey gets away. The house is fine. And it turns out that the prologue is actually the epilogue, with Delilah showing the family from the opening scene around her suspiciously lowly-priced rental…

As a horror movie, The Amityville Terror is acceptable low-budget fodder, with a dull first half giving way to a moderately entertaining second; so that you might end up thinking more kindly of it than it deserves, the lack of a climactic explosion notwithstanding. It’s objectively better than its immediate predecessors in the franchise, if less unintentionally funny, and certainly more competently made. However, as a franchise entry—it simply illustrates the ever-descending nature of the bar.

The now-undemanding nature of this franchise plus its built-in brand recognition continues to result in the regular release of alleged Amityville sequels—with The Amityville Terror being one of four to appear across 2016. Yet to be considered here are The Amityville Legacy – which if nothing else holds out the promise of one of those horrifying cymbal-banging monkey things – and the all-too-aptly named Amityville: No Escape.

For charity!