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.”
With Amityville Vanishing Point unavailable to stream or buy in Canada, I’ve had to leap frog over it and go directly to 2016’s The Amityville Legacy (aka Amityville Toybox).
Co-written and co-directed by Dustin Ferguson and Mike Johnson (file away the former: he’ll return several times in the future), the 15th Amityville film is another low-budget, independent effort. All of the characters have the same first name as the actor playing them, and the performances are often amateurish. Namely the film’s visual aesthetic is flat and the audio quality is poor, particularly in early scenes set in cars. The plot recycles the events of both the original and the remake, with a father who goes mad and kills his family, up to and including an opening that re-stages the DeFeo Jr. murders depicted in the Rosenberg-directed original and then recreated in Amityville II: The Possession.
The film centers around the birthday of Janson family patriarch Mark (Mark Popejoy) as his adult children return home to celebrate his 50th. Later in the film it’s suggested that Mark resents everyone except his pregnant youngest daughter, Britany (Britany Dailey), who stayed behind to help him care for his aging (dementia-suffering) mother, Jeanne (Jeanne Kern).
The other children include eldest daughter Julia (Julia Farrell), drunk Jennii (Jennii Caroline), Breana (Breana Mitchell), and gay brother Tony (Tony Brown).
Also in the mix are Breana’s overeager boyfriend Daniel (Daniel Joseph Stier), as well as Tony’s boyfriend Jade (Jade Michael LaFont). And if that weren’t enough characters for a 66-minute feature, there’s also cousin Schuylar (Schuylar Craig) and her cheetah print-wearing, alcoholic mother Aunt Cheyenne (Cheyenne King).
Sidebar: One of the challenges of the film is that it has far too many characters with too few distinguishing characteristics. The fact that the daughters all resemble each other and have similar sounding names doesn’t help.
The action kicks off when Julia gifts her father a nostalgic toy from his youth: a cymbal-wielding “Musical Jolly Chimp” that he promptly cuts his foot on in the night. Naturally the toy is a relic of the original Amityville home and, from that moment on, Mark descends into homicidal madness, represented by hallucinations of his dead father, played by former Nebraska state Senator (?!) Colby Coash.
Grandpa, who can also be seen by Grandma Jeanne for unexplained reasons, encourages Mark to restore the Janson family’s reputation by dispatching first the unsuitable romantic partners, then its deviant members. Initially The Amityville Legacy is surprisingly progressive: Mark is surprisingly supportive of his pregnant daughter, accepting of his gay son, and tolerant of his alcoholic sister-in-law.
As the film advances, Mark’s corruption is manifested by his open hostility to family members and encouraged by Grandpa’s homophobic/misogynistic/conservative rants. Obviously this is Ferguson and Johnson’s cue that the patriarch is becoming murderous, but it still requires audiences to sit through a litany of off-color remarks and offensive slurs.
Despite its overt aping of other properties and the generally poor technical quality, The Amityville Legacy is surprisingly amusing. There’s plenty of unintentional camp in the broad performances and frequently bizarre plot turns, but there’s also a savvy awareness of a few of the earlier entries in the franchise.
Case in point: a recreation of Amityville Dollhouse’s fantastic 360 degree breakfast table sequence. Sure, it’s a little less smooth and a little more unwieldy here, but Ferguson and Johnson deserve respect for including a callback to one of the series’ most memorable shots (Ditto the film’s frequent sexual refrain “Stop me, daddy” and the clear moment of father/daughter incest, which harken back to both Possession and Dollhouse).
Finally, in a strange twist, the best part of the film has nothing to do with the Janson family. The main plot of the film is concluded at the 58-minute mark, followed by an ~8 minute coda featuring a family of paranormal investigators who run afoul of the evil entity left in the house. This brief plot and its uncredited actors are more compelling than the feature that precedes them, especially the possessed paper boy who delivers a surprisingly menacing performance.
If nothing else, this makes me excited for Ferguson’s 2017 sequel, Amityville: Evil Never Dies (re-released in 2020 as Amityville Clown).
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Visual Aesthetic: While the alternating Christmas color scheme used to highlight Mark’s hallucinations isn’t subtle, it does help to break up the monotony of the house’s drab beige color palette.
- Amityville Accent Watch: Why is Tony the only member of the family with an accent? Throw in The Amityville Asylum, and this franchise has such a weird relationship with accents.
- Campiest Moment: Cheyenne is kind of a hoot, and while it wouldn’t be amusing in real life, the recurring bit where she repeatedly tries to force booze on Mark, who has been sober for 20 years, is an absolutely wild recurring character beat.
- Best Dialogue: The film contains plenty of inauthentic, tin-earned dialogue, but my favorite is Mark’s birthday toast to himself: “I just wish that your mother, my wife, could be here for this.” No human person would phrase it this way!
- With that said, the siblings mocking Breana and Dan’s lazy excuse for sneaking off to have sex with “I hope you guys napped with protection” is pretty funny.
Next Time: We’re staying in 2016 to look at The Amityville Terror, which appears to have *slightly* higher production values? We’ll find out in a couple weeks.
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