Marvin (David Stein, who seems to be channeling George from Seinfeld) and his wife Debbie (Dawna Wightman) have driven over to Amityville to look at prospective houses to buy when Marvin stumbles as if by chance on a really nice house for sale that’s going cheap. You know what house it is (or is supposed to be; more on that later) and you know why it’s so cheap. Marvin doesn’t, he just sees a great opportunity, while Debbie is instinctually frightened by the home, but she says next to nothing to stop Marvin from buying it. Soon he’s invited a small group of close friend over to stay at the house and help get it into running shape. But you know what happens next, right? Debbie starts seeing visions of a hung man, weird things start happening to the guests, fights and squabbles break out, no one is happy but Marvin, who keeps making excuses. Yada, yada, yada, the ghosts come into play, someone gets possessed, death occurs, and then they all flee for their lives. It’s just another day in Amityville.
So this one is a real outlier to the others. They all seem to follow a narrative stream, as weak as it is, but The Amityville Curse completely ignores what came before it, including the iconic house and setting from the other films. That’s right, these characters are in the famous Amityville House, but it’s a completely different house! Nothing that happened before seems to matter and really the only connection we get to the first movie is the fact that the previous occupants left in a hurry and the DeFeo story gets told again. Curse appears to be playing as a direct sequel to the first movie, but that’s kind of hard to do when the filmmakers are using different houses. Beyond that bizarre decision, the rest of the movie is fairly ho-hum. Nothing really exciting happens, and there’s nothing really scary about it (although the woman who plays the Sex Witch in Conan the Barbarian is one of the characters, which is pretty cool). We get a slipshod attempt at some makeup FX towards the end, but it’s fairly rote at this point, as is all the haunting shenanigans. Hell, we even get a sort-of recreation of the crawling tarantula scene from the famous Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii TV episode. In the end, this is a competent, if dull film.
No real reason to see this, unless you’re a completionist. Otherwise, I’d say you could spend your time doing something else. It’s not a bad movie, it’s just kind of average. Nothing exciting here, but nothing utterly dreadful, either. Meh.
★★☆☆