This time, it’s a haunted mirror that sat in the old Amityville house that is causing all the problems. It belongs to a weird homeless guy that photographer Keyes Terry (Ross Partridge) takes pictures of in the streets and this homeless man, who appears to have some strange link to Keyes, gives the young man the mirror as a gift. Keyes, an artist with the camera, recognizes the work put into the ornate frame and accepts it. Soon the homeless man is dead and the mirror resides in the loft Keyes shares with a fellow artist. And very soon after that, strange events start to occur. People who gaze into the mirror see their own reflections start to do things inside the mirror that the people outside are not doing. People die, almost unexplainably (except, you know, haunted Amityville mirror) and when they do, the mirror always shows an image of the house in Amityville, those evil window-eyes staring with a pitiless glare. The odd family Keyes has built around himself starts to crumble, and Keyes learns more and more about his mysterious past, somehow linked to the very house the mirror came from. In the end, the evil must be confronted. Will Keyes redeem himself, or will he fall and become another victim to the house in Amityville?
This was a pretty solid sequel. The direction is good, the acting is great, the story itself pretty interesting. The slow-burn build to the climax is engrossing, but then it sort of falls apart because the ending itself is so dull. Instead of a spectacular triumph over evil, it feels more like a therapy session, where the patient finally comes to peace with whatever trauma is haunting him or her. This was builds to a bang but ends with a whimper. This is, of course, totally disappointing, because the deaths are weird, there’s some cool practical effects, the characters are engaging, but it all kind of goes nowhere. It feels like they had something else planned but ran out of money so this is what we got. The movie is not ruined, not by any means, but it does hurt its replay ability. I can’t imagine I’ll watch this again. That said, it’s very well done and for a direct to video release, it’s not bad at all, except for the flat tire ending.
The Amityville curse continues onward, the house affecting families from as far away as California and places in-between. It will carry forth into one more movie, to be reviewed tomorrow, and then its evil will rest until the remake in 2005, and carry forth in a few films after that. But I’m not going to explore those, not yet. For now, we are left with this seventh entry in the series, and while the series itself shows remarkable staying power, it’s starting to flag. And this entry, despite its (now nostalgic) oh-so-90s feel, starts to show the cracks in the longevity of this never-ending haunting.
★★☆☆
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