That plucky old evil house in Amityville has held on strong and tight, despite getting pretty destroyed in the second movie (the prequel) and abandoned in the original. Now it’s all alone, no buyers, only an elderly spiritualist couple who have rented it out to run séances in. Skeptic reporters John (Tony Roberts) and Melanie (Candy Clark) bust the couple in their scam, exposing them for the frausters they are. In fact, John doesn’t believe in ghosts or the hauntings at Amityville, either, so when he finds out the house is going cheap, he decides to buy it. Why should he worry, right? None of that supernatural stuff is real, anyway. Well, we know how this story goes. Pretty soon, weird things are happening at the house, and John’s daughter Susan (a young Lori Loughlin) and her best friend Lisa (a young Meg Ryan) decide to hold their own séance and of course it all turns rotten. Cue up the flies and the strangeness and the demonic evil. John is no longer a skeptic, he’s a believer, and this change in perspective might just cost him everything he has, because the house in Amityville doesn’t care.
Filmed in 3D, I bet this was a real hoot to see back in the day. I saw it on home video (no 3D there!) and really enjoyed it, but I think I might have appreciated it even more with all those ghosts and animated flies and exploding boards and thrown bodies flying at my face. What fun! The third entry tries to return to some semblance of normality after the insanity of the second film. How are you going to top that? So we get a pretty good story about a skeptic and his struggles with what to believe and his stubbornness even in the midst of his entire world crumbling all around him. Pretty compelling, and Tony Roberts is great in the role, as is the awesome Candy Clark as his Girl Friday. The scares themselves aren’t anything special; you’ve seen them already and they’re pretty by the book. Nothing wrong with that, but since this isn’t your first ride in a rodeo, you won’t find many surprises. The ending is great, though, when they finally dispense respectability and start almost literally throwing shit against the walls. Things explode, bodies get tossed around, and we get a cool demon creature. And finally, the house itself blows up. All of this must have been pretty awesome in 3D!
So a series that is repeating itself somewhat comes up with a winning formula for its third entry. This isn’t the best haunted house/ghost movie in the world, but it’s a damned decent one, and as part of the Amityville series, it’s probably my second favorite. Solid, entertaining, with interesting characters and a wacko ending, you can’t really go wrong here. I’d put it somewhere between two and three stars.
★★✮☆