Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
Co-written and co-directed by Will Collazo Jr and Julie Anne Prescott (who acted in Thomas J. Churchill’s The Amityville Harvest), Amityville Thanksgiving is something of a curiousity.
The film is partially composed of camcorder footage of Dr. Frank DeMonico (Mark C. Fullhardt), a couples therapist who invites struggling clients to use his secluded cottage over the Thanksgiving weekend as a last ditch effort to save their relationship.
Initially it seems as though the footage is just recordings of Dr. Frank’s sessions, but over time he begins using it as a confessional to admit to his nefarious plot. This coincides with additional footage, often night vision, from cameras planted around the house that allow him to spy on the couples when he’s not there.
It turns out that Dr. Frank is something of an occultist, who tries to impregnate a woman each year in order to carry his “demon spawn/seed” and make him immortal (how this works is unclear). When his efforts inevitably fail, the mad therapist sacrifices his patients and eats them (sadly the low budget production only alludes to the cannibalism and never actually shows it).
This year’s sacrificial couple is Jackie (Natalie Peri) and Danny (Paul Faggione), a middle-aged pair who are sexually dysfunctional. Jackie is desperate for intimacy, while Danny claims he can’t perform because of her constant nagging. Their bickering, seemingly ad-libbed dialogue occupies most of the first two acts of the film, which proves to be both repetitive and uninteresting (it gets old fast).
Uninspired dialogue aside, the early part of the film still has promise, particularly when Dr. Barron Richards (Tom Ciorciari), another Amityville couples therapist stops by to threaten Dr. Nick and warn Jackie and Danny that they’re in danger. Of course, because of the shoddy plotting, Jackie and Danny disregard this advice, despite Danny suggesting that Dr. Nick has bodies buried all over the yard only moments earlier.
The most confronting aspect of Amityville Thanksgiving, though, is Dr. Frank’s lewd behaviour. Until it becomes clear that the therapist is the villain, his suggestive comments about Jackie’s body, as well as his inappropriate touching, is extremely uncomfortable. Fullhardt openly plays into his character’s lecherous interests, though one wishes he would grandstand a little more once his plans are revealed in the back half of the film.
The best part of the often nonsensical film occurs when Danny plays with a burnt Ouija board he finds and becomes possessed by the Reaper (Forrest Bennett). Not only is Faggione’s “acting” in this section of the film hilarious (picture a grown man lumbering around under the influence), but Danny and Jackie proceed to have 10 seconds of grunting sex, after which she exclaims that it was the “best sex ever.”
Alas it’s all downhill from here. Dr. Frank’s confessionals dominate the remainder of the narrative and we see in only a few brief scenes that Jackie and Danny were both killed shortly thereafter. It’s almost as though Faggione and Peri were no longer available to shoot and their scenes were hastily rewritten, but it means there’s no climax and the film whimpers to another close featuring a number of the filmmakers’ influencer friends playing news reporters who deliver tired, green screen heavy exposition dumps about Dr. Frank.
Ultimately Amityville Thanksgiving has a glimmer of an interesting premise, but the execution is lacking on all fronts. Like so many of these latter entries, there’s simply not enough here to recommend.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Is This Comedy? Like so many of the recent ‘Amityville’ films, it’s a fine line between comedy and poor filmmaking. Take, for example, the sound effect of fireworks that accompanies Danny’s climax during sex with Jackie. That *has* to be intentional comedy, right?
- Bizarre Motivation: It is evidently clear that Dr. Frank is committing sacrifices annually, but at the end of the film he admits he’s dying, which confirms that he wasn’t even killing people in exchange for immortality! Why bother making a murderous pact with demons if you don’t even get the basic perks?
- Double The Doctors: I’m cackling at the idea of a town the size of Amityville (at least in the films) having two different couples therapists. Even if one is evil and eating his patients, the concept boggles the mind.
- Cabin Isolation: At one point Danny reveals that they travelled 200 miles to reach Dr. Frank’s cabin. Considering Danny and Jackie do nothing but fight and ignore each other’s feelings, that doesn’t seem like time – and gas money – well spent.
- LGBTQIA Representation: In an unusual move for the ‘Amityville’ series, there are actually queer characters in this film! Naturally they’re played by straight actors David Perry and Shawn C. Phillips and they’re walking clichés (Perry’s Enrique has cheated on Phillips’ Jeremy and they’re into “kink”), but hey…progress?
- Dr. Frank casually mentions late in the film that he stuffed Jeremy into Enrique and then ate them and the fact that there’s no attempt at a Turducken reference of any kind is maddening.
- Turkey Lurkey Time: Considering the box art and another of Dr. Frank’s offhand remarks about a married couples dressing up in costume, the film is disappointingly light on a certain seasonal bird of a feather. Still, the moment that Jackie walks in on apparitions of a couple doing the horizontal mambo in a turkey outfit (complete with gobble gobble diegetic sound!) made me yearn for the weird sex of the “franchise”s early entries. Here’s hoping we get more of this weirdness in the sequel!
- Cheetah Fantastic: Between Danny’s New Jersey accent and Jackie’s predilection for cheetah prints, the feuding couple feel gently mob-coded and that would have been more interesting than anything else in the film.
- Best Dialogue: Enrique (to Dr Frank): “Just letting someone eat your ass ain’t cheating”
- See You Soon: Don’t fret, this is the first of three (!) Will Collazo Jr-directed ‘Amityville’ films we’ll discuss, including Amityville Shark House and the aforementioned sequel to this film, Amityville Turkey Day, which *thankfully* has better ratings than this one.
Next time: we’re headed back into the definitely not Derry-inspired woods for a discussion of Jt Kriss’ Ghosts of Amityville aka Amityville Clown (2022).
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