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Synopsis:
A team of priests led by Father Manfred (Norman Lloyd) enters the
notorious Amityville house to perform an exorcism. Father Dennis
Kibbler (Fredric Lehne) enters a room containing a bizarre,
man-sized lamp. As the young priest performs the ritual, the lamp
glows, and a strange force enters it by travelling through its power
cord. For a moment, a demonic face is visible within the lamp; then
something throws Father Kibbler across the room, and he is knocked
unconscious…. The next day, Father Manfred inspects the house, and
feels that the evil has departed. A yard sale is held to dispose of
the furniture. Helen Royce (Peggy McCay) decides to buy the lamp as
a joke present for her sister in California. Inspecting it more
closely, Helen cuts her finger on it. Her friend, Rhona (Gloria
Cromwell), warns her to get a tetanus shot, but Helen laughs the
incident off. The lamp arrives at Alice Leacock’s (Jane Wyatt) house
at the same time as Alice’s newly-widowed daughter, Nancy Evans
(Patty Duke), and her three children, Amanda (Geri Betzler), Brian (Aron
Eisenberg) and Jessica (Brandy Gold). After greeting her family,
Alice opens the gift from her sister and assembles the lamp. Nancy
is appalled by its ugliness. At that moment, Alice’s cat starts to
howl, and scratches Amanda. Jessica stares fixedly at the lamp….
That night, Nancy apologises to her mother for "invading" her home,
promising that they will leave as soon as she gets her
qualifications and secures a teaching job. She then confesses to
being very worried about Jessica, who has regressed emotionally
since her father’s death, and keeps insisting that he is still
alive. In the living-room, the lamp begins to glow. The mysterious
force leaves it, entering a power point. All over the house, the
lights flicker; in the kitchen, the electric kettle and the radio
switch themselves on. Alice burns her hand on the kettle. Preparing
for bed, Nancy is shocked to see her dead husband’s reflection in
her mirror, She spins around but there is no-one there. Jessica asks
her mother if she can sleep with her. Nancy says yes, but just this
once. As she sleeps, Nancy feels an arm tighten around her: a man’s
arm…. Jerking awake, Nancy finds that Jessica isn’t there. Following
her daughter’s voice, she finds her sitting before the lamp. Jessica
accuses Nancy of "scaring him", insisting that her father was there.
The next morning, the family is horrified when Brian finds Alice’s
pet parrot dead in the toaster oven. Meanwhile, in New York, Father
Kibbler is released from hospital. Visiting the house, he is
appalled to learn that the furniture has been sold, and gets Helen
Royce’s name from the caretaker. That night, Father Manfred warns
Father Kibbler that evil can and will transmigrate into people or
objects. In California, Brian is inspecting the chainsaw he finds in
Alice’s basement when it switches itself on, demolishing much of the
basement and almost injuring Alice. Peggy (Lou Hancock), insists
that they call an electrician, as the house’s wiring must be faulty.
Father Kibbler goes to Helen Royce’s house. Rhona sees him, and
tells him that Helen is in hospital. Hearing how Helen contracted
tetanus, Father Kibbler demands to know where the lamp is now. The
son of the local electrician comes to Alice’s house to collect the
kettle and chainsaw for his father. Peggy asks him to help move the
lamp into the attic. Left alone, the lamp starts to glow, although
it is not plugged in. Downstairs, Amanda asks the boy to inspect the
garbage disposal unit, which seems to be blocked….
Comments:
You know, every now and then, when you’re in the bad movie review
business, there comes a moment when you suddenly wonder:
What am I doing with my life?
For my friend and colleague,
Mr Kenneth
Begg, for instance, such a moment occurred while he was
reviewing From Hell It Came, when upon writing,
She warns Maranka that the Tabanga has
made an appearance, he was moved to add
parenthetically, There’s
a sentence I never thought I’d write!
For myself, my moment of introspection occurred at approximately
3.45 pm, July 28th,
as I found myself typing, As the
young priest performs the ritual, the lamp glows, and a strange
force enters it by travelling through its power cord.
That’s right: I’m spending my
Saturday afternoon reviewing a movie about an evil, terrifying,
demonic….lamp.
Granted, it’s a horrible, dark,
wet and windy Saturday, so I probably wouldn’t be doing anything
more constructive anyway; but still….
Amityville: The
Evil Escapes
(or, as I prefer to think of it, The Amityville Horror: The
Evil Escapes, Part 4; a film this clumsy deserves
a title that clumsy) is a franchise film in the very worst
sense of the expression. Not only is it built around one of the
dumbest concepts ever to grace a bad movie, it was
[*shudder*]
made-for-TV, which means that any time anything remotely scary or
gruesome threatens to happen (which isn’t often), we get a discrete
fade to black. What’s left is a mix of soap opera histrionics and
unintentional comedy, punctuated by long stretches of outright
dullness. Unlike its predecessors, this film doesn’t even have the
redeeming ongoing presence of The House, which merely by being there
managed to add a few frissons
to the otherwise hilarious Amityville 3-D. Of
course, a reasonable person might argue that The House
couldn’t be in this
film since, as those of you who have been paying attention (i.e.
not the
people who made this film) might remember, it blew itself up at the
end of the previous installment. Not to worry, though: here (albeit
briefly) it’s back, hale and hearty. Tragically, however, we get
only two fleeting glimpses of it, one by night, one by day; and then
it’s gone….gone forever…. [*sob*]
(Oh, sure, they try to photograph Alice Leacock’s place so it
looks like The
House, but it’s just not the same….) Following glimpse #1, a group
of priests (what is
the collective term for priests? a cassock? a confessional?) pours
through the front doors and starts going whupass with the holy
water. The House responds in a manner somewhat less than terrifying,
shaking its chandeliers, opening and closing its doors, and turning
the gas on all by itself. One priest gets clobbered with a little
wooden rocking-chair. Spooky! Father Dennis Kibbler, the youngest of
the holy crew, gets the toughest job: he enters the room, wherein
lies – the lamp.
And an evil-looking thing it is too, with a twisted, tree-like
stand, and creepy arm-like projections. (Actually, what this thing
looks like more than anything else in the world is the Evil Tree in
Tales That Witness Madness!) Kibbler goes manfully
about his task, and succeeds so well that Evil is flushed from its
hiding place and forced to find a new refuge – which it accomplishes
by scuttling up the lamp’s power cord in a suspiciously cartoon-like
manner. For one brief moment a demonic face is visible within the
glass globe, and then Father Kibbler is blown off his feet and
across the room, where he slides down the wall in a manner that is
also suspiciously cartoon-like. The next day, senior exorcist Father
Manfred re-visits the house and declares that The Evil has gone – he
can feel it.
And he’s right. The Evil is no longer in the house – it’s
out on the lawn.
With a price-tag attached to it….
In on
of the film’s more puzzling scenes, we see that all the furniture
from The House is being disposed of in a yard sale ("All items
freshly exorcised!"), and the locals, who have been crossing the
road to avoid The House for years, or speaking of it in hushed
voices, are now pawing through the goods like raccoons through
garbage. Now, who, exactly, does this furniture
belong to? I guess
the answer would depend upon when in the whole chain of events this
story is supposed to occur (and the time-line here is a little odd;
more on that later). In any case, the one person it doesn’t belong
to is the caretaker type who is clearly reaping the profits from
flogging it. (This guy could have made a tidy profit over the years:
after all, not one person who moved their furniture into The House
ever stopped to take it out again, did they?) Amongst the pawers is
Helen Royce, who takes one look at the lamp, declares it to be the
most hideous thing she’s ever seen in her life, and announces that
she’s buying it as a present for her sister.
Well, what can I say? Sisters are
like that. Trust me. I know.
Still
chuckling over her "joke" (the expression "more money than sense"
comes to mind), Helen manages to cut herself on the lamp. Her
friend, Rhona, suggests that she get a tetanus shot, but Helen waves
the advice away. (Later on, Helen will of course be punished for her
arrogance, being struck down in a manner so natural, it will
completely fail to terrify the audience.)
And so
the Evil Lamp is sent on its way to the West Coast. Coincidentally,
another source of horror is also wending its way towards Alice
Leacocks’s house: Alice’s somewhat estranged daughter, Nancy, and
her three "adorable" children. (Nancy is played by Patty Duke, who
by this stage of her career could legitimately be referred to as
"genre veteran Patty Duke".) Nancy and her kids have been thrown
upon the cold, cruel world by the sudden death of their husband and
father – and sole breadwinner – and are forced to move in with Alice
until Nancy finishes teachers’ college. Alice, it turns out, is less
than thrilled by this development. Still, like they say, "home is
the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in"; and as
it happens, the carload of Evanses arrives at Alice’s front door at
the very same moment that Helen Royce’s "joke" is being unloaded
from the back of the delivery van. And so, all unknowing, Alice
Leacock allows The Source Of All Evil into her home. Oh, yeah – and
she has The Lamp carried in, too. No sooner has The Lamp entered the
house than it begins to exert its evil on the youngest Evans child,
Jessica, who is suffering from various psychological disorders
because of her father’s death. Proving that (as if anyone doubted
it) animals are much smarter than your average horror movie
character, as soon as The Lamp is fully assembled, Alice’s parrot,
Fred, goes nuts; while her cat, Pepper, yowls and hisses and
scratches Amanda, the oldest kid. (Fred, BTW, is an Australian
Eastern rosella. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: way to
encourage illegal bird trafficking!) Amanda and Brian immediately
start squabbling (provoking me into an agonised cry of, "NO!! Not
another
crappy horror film filled with sulky, bratty teenagers!!" As it
turned out later, my fears were largely unjustified, since Amanda
and Brian are unusually well-behaved. A pair of doofuses [doofi?],
yes, but not totally objectionable), while Jessica stares at The
Lamp in an Ominous, Foreshadowing Manner.
That
night, Alice and Nancy have a D & M in the kitchen, in which Nancy
apologises for their "invasion", and Alice (not arguing with Nancy’s
choice of word) displays her sensitivity by dissing the recently
deceased Frank Evans. Meanwhile, The Lamp glows into eerie life, as
Three Centuries Of Evil (as it is later called) chugs its way along
the power cord and hops into the power point. We are immediately
tipped off that this is going to be yet another "electrical devices
come to life" movie, just what the world needed. (Hey, if I enjoyed
that sort of
thing, I’d watch Maximum Overdrive again, right?
Well – maybe not….) The lights flicker all over the house, and
appliances start turning themselves on, including [dum-dum-duumm]
the kettle!
Nancy and Alice barely notice, as Nancy is making a fairly
unavailing effort to confide in her mother, expressing her concerns
about her borderline psychotic youngest child. Alice, however, waves
this aside and continues to focus on something
much more
disturbing: her grandson’s appearance. "I mean, what kind of haircut
do you call
that?" she demands. (She’s got a point. Let’s put it this way: if
you were playing Pictionary and the clue was "mid-eighties", a quick
sketch of Aron Eisenberg would fit the bill nicely. Think Andrew
Ridgely circa
"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go". Hey, whaddya
mean you don’t know
who Andrew Ridgely is!?….). Perhaps feeling that the conversation is
not going well, Alice gets up to make more tea, and burns her hand
on the now-demonic kettle - a scene suggesting, not that The Source
Of All Evil is on the loose so much as that Alice bought a shoddily
designed kettle. Booga-booga!
After a
couple more equally false "scares", we get the one scene in this
whole film that really does work. In a moment somewhat reminiscent
of Mario Bava’s
Shock,
while Nancy lies sleeping a man’s arm suddenly slides around her and
holds her tight. Nancy smiles in her sleep….only to jerk awake with
a terrified gasp as her conscious mind realises that this really
shouldn’t be
happening. But of course, there’s no-one there – not even Jessica,
who was sharing her mother’s bed. Nancy hears her daughter’s voice
and follows it into the living-room, where Jessica is holding a
conversation with – someone. (Although the youngest child in the
original
Amityville Horror interacted with "an invisible
friend", this aspect of the film does not reference that, but
instead is written and filmed so as to blatantly rip off
Poltergeist.) Nancy is, not surprisingly, rather taken
aback when Jessica insists that she’s been talking to Daddy; and
tries unavailingly to convince the girl that it was "all a dream".
The next morning, Jessica has a fever, allowing the diagnosis to
switch to "all an hallucination". Downstairs, Nancy starts
breakfast, telling Brian to heat up the toaster oven, which he does.
However, when he goes to put the rolls in, he finds the oven already
occupied – by the unfortunate Fred. Finding Fred’s cage open, Alice
blames herself for his tragic demise, not once stopping to inquire
how a one hundred gram bird managed to open the oven door, hop
inside, and then close it again! (I guess he
really wanted out
of this film!)
Fred’s
death is the best this film can do by way of bothering its audience.
Although "Three Centuries Of Evil" are supposed to be lurking in The
Lamp, its manifestations become more and more gigglesome as the film
progresses. To be blunt (and again to use an expression I heartily
despise), Evil hits like a girl. Its next effort at "terrorising"
occurs when Brian follows Pepper, the cat, into the basement, and
discovers a chainsaw lying on a bench. Acting as if never realised
that anything so miraculous even existed, Brian immediately picks it
up (obviously seeing what’s coming, Pepper beats a hasty retreat at
this point) and starts waving it about making "Vroom-vroom!" noises.
(Like I said – doofus!) Of course, the chainsaw then starts itself,
and in the course of a hugely entertaining minute, Brian manages to
demolish the entire basement. Alice and her housekeeper, Peggy, come
running to see what the noise is and nearly end up kindling
themselves. Peggy, however, leaps somewhat improbably to the rescue,
slamming a metal bar against the saw, which then decides to turn
itself off. Brian pleads innocence, of course ("I’m
stoopid, not
homicidal!"), and incredibly, both his mother and his older sister
believe him implicitly. Nancy insists that faulty wring is to blame,
and calls an electrician. However, it is the electrician’s teenage
son who answers the call. After helping Peggy shift The Lamp into
the attic, the kid wanders into the kitchen to find Amanda trying to
clear a blockage in the garbage disposal unit by sticking her hand
down there. (Doofus!) Telling her that she should have taped the
on-off switch off first, he does so, and then sticks
his hand down the
unit. No prizes for guessing what happens next: this is one of the
movie’s Discreet Fade To Black moments. The following morning, the
boy’s astonishingly unperturbed father comes to inspect the site of
the accident. His verdict? "My son’s a
doofus!" Well, he doesn’t say that –
instead, he decides with a shrug that the kid must have taped the
unit on, not
off. Nancy
announces sternly that until the problem is solved, no-one should
touch any electrical appliances. This edict lasts approximately two
minutes, until Nancy finds Jessica in the attic chatting with
"Daddy". As she hauls the girl out, kicking and screaming, Nancy
yells at Amanda to "get up there and unplug that lamp!" Looking
understandably apprehensive, Amanda obeys, but of course, it isn’t
plugged in…. For its next manifestation, The Source Of All Evil goes
for one of the classics and causes black goop to run out of all the
taps. Despite the fact that everyone agrees it "smells like a
sewer", Amanda fails to notice anything wrong and brushes her teeth
with it (doofus!). Both Nancy and Alice have to go out, leaving
Jessica alone with Peggy. The housekeeper reacts to the fact that
raw sewage is running out of the water pipes by doing a load of
washing. Meanwhile, the summoned plumber crawls in under the house
(obviously not having bothered to shut off the water!), and tries to
unscrew the end of the main pipe. Suddenly, the pipe swells up,
knocking down a crossbeam and pinning the unfortunate plumber to the
ground. Evil Black Goop then explodes from the pipe (if you look
carefully, you’ll also see a remarkably intact
hand!), and the
plumber – an audience identification figure if ever there was one –
can do nothing but lie there, trapped, and drowning in shit.
Meanwhile, Good has been marshalling its forces – such as they are.
Father Manfred and Father Kibbler discuss the latter’s encounter
with Evil, and it is here that we get a rather odd potted history of
The Amityville House, which according to Father Manfred has been
exerting its Evil influence for over three hundred years. He goes on
to remark that "a dozen years ago", he would not have believed what
he does now, but that "as recently as 1974" a boy was driven by
"voices" to murder his entire family. We wait, but no further
evidence of the House’s power – the possession of a priest, the
tormenting of the Lutz family, the attacks on the sceptical John
Baxter – is so much as glanced at. Instead, the screenplay simply
ignores the events of two and a half of the preceding
Amityville films! (This is particularly odd since
writer-director Sandor Stern wrote #1 as well!) Crusading Father
Kibbler tracks down the whereabouts of The Lamp From Hell, and
decides to travel to California for a final showdown. Father Manfred
warns him that the church hierarchy probably won’t let him go, and
suggests they ask the police to call on Alice Leacock instead – at
which point, the film comes perilously close to acknowledging its
own idiocy, as Kibbler retorts, "And tell them what? A satanic force
has taken possession of a lamp!?"
Unable to argue, Manfred promises to "speak to the Monsignor". His
intervention is successful, and Father Kibbler arrives at Alice
Leacock’s in minimum time. Since Peggy has just had a fatal
encounter with The Lamp, the door of the house is opened by Jessica,
who repeatedly – and rather creepily – insists on the priest coming
in and sitting down. Father Kibbler, however, is overcome by nausea
(know the feeling!), and dashes away from the house to throw up.
(YES!! A puking priest scene!! How
gratifying to see the franchise finally
get back to its roots!) Unable to quell his fear completely, Kibbler
writes a note to Alice and drops it into her mailbox, where Amanda
later finds it. Meanwhile, Nancy is disturbed to find Peggy missing,
and even more so when Jessica contends that she "went home". The
search is soon on, and once again it is the luckless Brian – who
also found Fred in the toaster oven – who discovers Peggy’s body.
(The verdict is "heart attack", even though we saw her being
strangled by The Lamp’s power cord.) Moreover, Jessica’s room has
been completely trashed, a clear sign of demonic possession. Or
hyperactivity. Re-reading the note from Father Kibbler, Nancy
decides to meet with him. She tells Amanda to stay with Jessica at
all times, Brian to lock the attic and hide the key, reassures them
that she "won’t be long", and takes off, leaving her eldest children
to stare at one another in dismay.
In the
bar at his hotel, Father Kibbler explains to Nancy all about the
"Evil Lamp" thing, warning her that the Evil will attack the most
vulnerable person in its environment. Realising that this means that
Jessica’s problems probably can’t
be solved with Ritalin,
Nancy invites Kibbler back to her place for
coffee and a quick exorcism. Meanwhile, Amanda decides to break up
the monotony of babysitting a satanically possessed child by looking
for the cat. It turns out to be on the roof, giving Amanda the
opportunity to lean out the window – which promptly whacks her on
the back of the head and knocks her out. (Doofus!) Jessica evades
her brother and grandmother to make a dash for the attic. Nancy
arrives with Father Kibbler. The latter immediately charges up to
the attic, but can’t get the door open. Amanda staggers in rubbing
her head, and Kibbler yells at her to bring an axe. Nancy
intervenes, sensibly ordering both Amanda and Brian out of the
house. Kibbler fetches the axe himself (I was hoping for the
chainsaw, but never mind) and bashes his way through the
suspiciously flimsy door to where The Lamp is exerting about 100
watts of Evil. What follows is one of the most pathetic "exorcisms"
I’ve ever seen, and believe me, I’ve sat through some doozies!
First, Kibbler starts with the holy water, but is stopped when
Jessica levitates towards him shrieking "Don’t hurt my Daddy!" and
brandishing a knife. She succeeds in stabbing Kibbler in the
shoulder before he and Nancy can subdue her and toss the knife away.
Kibbler then moves in with the crucifix, only have it jerked from
his hand as The Demonic Power Cord wraps itself around his arm.
Nancy is distracted from her ongoing struggle with Jessica when the
demonic face within the lamp briefly becomes that of the late Frank
Evans, and Jessica reclaims the knife. She goes to stab Nancy, but
is stopped by the power of Mother Love (yecchh!). Meanwhile, Alice
has had enough, and she
starts in with the holy water, shouting, "Leave us alone, you son of
a bitch!" – which frankly works better than any of Kibbler’s ritual
chants. The Lamp recoils (leaving a trail of black goop, rather
comically suggesting that The Source Of All Evil has had an
accident, and Alice presses her advantage, finally lifting The Lamp
and tossing it through the window. Unfortunately for Father Kibbler,
he is still enmeshed in The Demonic Power Cord. However, The Cord
proves to have grown about a hundred yards, and therefore Nancy has
time to snatch up the axe and sever it, freeing Kibbler and allowing
The Lamp to plunge to its destruction on the rocks below the cliff.
The film then dissolves into a scene of mass hugging and kissing as
the family celebrates its new-found ability to express love. "All
this sweetness is bad for my blood suger," remarks Alice, who seems
remarkably cheerful considering she’s on her way to her sister’s
funeral. Oh, right – that lamp
business…. Alice then departs with Father Kibbler, the Evanses do a
bit more hugging, and everything seems to be sunshine and lollipops.
But wait! – would you be astonished to learn that It Isn’t Over
After All?? Well, frankly, neither was I – although the
way in which we
learn it is a jaw-dropping experience. The film ends with –
surprise! – a pan across the smashed lamp, and lurking beside it is
Pepper, the cat; and as he yowls and turns towards the camera, we
see that----
----the
film-makers could think of no better way of closing this pathetic
excuse for a horror movie than by ripping off
another pathetic
excuse for a horror movie,
Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula. And if you don’t know what I
mean, shame on you!
It’s
always kind of sad watching the deterioration that sets in over the
course of a horror movie franchise, although I guess that in the
case of the Amityville
stories, there wasn’t all that great a height to fall from. Still,
the three previous films did manage a few shivers, even if it was
simply by keeping that damn creepy house in front of the cameras.
This fourth effort is simply ludicrous – but then, how could it be
otherwise, given its basic premise? I mean, didn’t anyone, at any
stage of the film’s production, stop and wonder whether focussing
their story on a possessed lamp
was really a good idea!? In any case, the film’s supernatural
manifestations are rarely other than risible. What credibility the
film has comes not from the alleged scare scenes, but in the
depiction of the tensions between Alice Leacock and her unwanted
houseguests. The dysfunctional family is at the heart of many horror
films, of course, and this one is no different, except that it
rather refreshingly acknowledges that a "family" can sometimes be a
bunch of people with little in common who probably shouldn’t be
forced to live together. In fact (and you can hardly blame her,
given events), Alice goes through the entire film with the look on
her face suggesting that she wishes she’d had her tubes tied about
forty-five years earlier. Jane Wyatt’s performance (using the term
loosely) is probably the film’s low point; "disinterested" would be
a polite way of describing it. Her expression throughout the
climactic exorcism scene is priceless, though, being chiefly
indicative of extreme boredom. Patty Duke and Fredric Lehne at least
put a bit of effort into their performances; while Aron Eisenberg
and Geri Betzler manage to be less irritating than many of their
cinematic brethren (even if the latter
does suffer from an extremely
distracting case of chipmunk-cheeks: every time she opens her mouth,
you wait for her to spit out whatever it is she’s got in there;
that, or go into her Marlon Brando impression). Overall,
Amityville 4 is clear evidence that the bottom of the
barrel had not just been scraped, but licked clean; but I’m sure
that no-one will be surprised to hear that to date, another five
alleged "Amityville" films have been made. And there are those who
say that "evil" doesn’t exist….
Footnote:
The estimable (if power-crazed) gentlemen of
Stomp Tokyo have also reviewed this film, and have
provided for their readers’ delectation screen shots of The Evil
Lamp and The Positively Demonic Power Cord. Oh, and Aron Eisenberg’s
haircut. THE HORROR!! THE
HORROR!!
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