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Synopsis:
In Amityville, a priest is murdered in his own confessional.
Afterwards, the church is abandoned and its relics stored in the
basement of the old house nearby that was used as a rectory. Twelve
years later, prospective house-buyers Debbie (Dawna Wightman) and
Marvin (David Stein) head for Amityville to inspect a property.
Suddenly, Debbie insists upon a different route from the one planned
– and the two find themselves outside a huge, long-empty house. As
Marvin excitedly calculates the re-sale value once the house is
restored, Debbie whispers softly that she knows the place....
Marvin convinces newlyweds Frank (Kim Coates) and Abigail (Cassandra
Gava) and restaurateur Bill (Anthony Dean Rubes) to co-invest in the
purchase and renovation of the property with himself and Debbie. As
Bill and Abigail cross-question Marvin as to how he managed to
secure the place at such a low price, Debbie notices a silent,
motionless young man standing near the house with his dog. A moment
later, the youth has simply disappeared.... The five friends take up
residence in their investment, but their first night is spoiled by a
series of accidents: the railing of the basement stairs collapses
under Frank; Debbie puts her foot through a rotten board in the
kitchen and twists her ankle; and when the five are toasting their
purchase, Abigail’s glass shatters and cuts her hand. Debbie is on
her way to the bathroom when she hears a cat, which she follows to
the basement. There, she is convinced that she hears voices coming
from behind a wall. Later, Debbie tries to talk to Marvin about her
feeling that there is “something else” in the house, but he is
sneeringly dismissive. During the night, Debbie dreams that the wall
of the basement has been replaced by a door, behind which is a
confessional. Strange scratching noises come from within it, and a
form suddenly tries to force itself through its barred door, which
bends and stretches....and Debbie wakes, screaming, “There is
something evil in this house!”.... The five begin their
renovations, but are unexpectedly interrupted by an elderly woman
who sweeps through the house, peering at its bewildered occupants in
turn until she comes upon Debbie, who she assures mysteriously that,
“You’ll be all right.” Belatedly, the woman introduces
herself as Mrs Moriarty (Helen Hughes). Ignoring Marvin’s broad
hints that she should leave, the woman gives Debbie a crucifix. This
odd scene is interrupted when, outside the house, Frank barely
escapes being savaged by a dog. The others reach the scene as the
dog forces its way into the house. As they cower, Debbie suddenly
holds up the crucifix. The dog backs away – and a moment later, it
has vanished.... Working in the basement, Bill and Marvin find a
nailed-up door that has been hidden behind shelving. Over Marvin’s
objections, Bill forces his way through, finding a room containing
various objects taken from a Catholic church. As he approaches the
confessional, something seems to stir within it. Taking up a lance,
Bill tries to open the confessional door. At that instant, a
gale-force wind rips through the house, hurling open windows and
slamming doors, and trapping Bill in the basement....
Comments:
Consensus of opinion seems to be that The Amityville Curse is
the weakest of all the Amityville sequels, but I find myself
prepared to cut it just a tiny bit of slack. While it is certainly
true that this is by no means a good film, I don’t see how it can be
considered worse than its immediate predecessor,
The Evil Escapes, if only because it never
tries to frighten us with a possessed household appliance and a
lightly fricasseed parrot.
I believe that’s
what’s known as “being damned with faint praise”.
I am not at all up
on the Amityville literature, and I have no idea just where Hans
Holzer’s book “The Amityville Curse” sits amongst the various
branches and time streams of this most bizarre of cottage
industries, or for that matter whether it is fact or fiction. (Or
perhaps I should say, whether it declares itself to be fact
or fiction.) However, given the rather convoluted nature of the
writing credits that grace the opening of this film – “screenplay
based upon a book adapted by” – no matter how justified such
finger-pointing would be in numerous other respects, it would
probably be unjust to put the blame for this exceedingly limp entry
in the Amityville series on Dr Holzer.
The main problem
with The Amityville Curse----
Okay, okay.
One
of the main problems with The Amityville Curse is the
unmistakable sense that its story has been twisted into being
something it was never meant to be, in order to justify its
inclusion in the franchise. In truth, this could, and should, have
been a halfway decent horror movie. The right elements are here:
unresolved tensions, characters with secret histories, the sins of
the past erupting violently into the present....and all of it
bundled together in a spooky old house with a tragic past. If
paranormal elements were required to bolster the story, then
Debbie’s psychic abilities, her dreams and visions, her sense of
having been drawn to the house to uncover its history and lay its
ghosts, would have been enough. However, having gone to the effort
and expense of acquiring the rights to the venerable “Amityville”
brand-name (and to fair, it was probably necessary in order to get
the film made in the first place), the producers obviously felt that
they couldn’t afford to leave well enough alone. The end product is
a film turned into “a haunted house story” against its will, with
some extremely desultory supernatural happenings clumsily grafted
onto what is ultimately revealed to be a very human story of
wrongdoing, revenge and madness.
Indeed, the events
that precipitate the drama, supernatural and otherwise, in The
Amityville Curse are about as transgressive as anyone could
desire: the murder of a priest, in his own confessional,
in his own church – and that’s not even mentioning the motive
for the murder, which has to do with a few more transgressions of
the priest’s own committing. Unfortunately, none of this has much to
do with the supposedly haunted house down the street, which is not
only not where the murder was committed, but had not even
been occupied long by the priest before his killer tracked him down.
It isn’t even a house with a history: just an ordinary house whose
owner happened to get murdered. To get around this, the writers have
the church closed down following the murder, and its artefacts,
including the confessional, stored in the basement of the rectory.
(Having Marvin & co. buy and remodel the abandoned church doesn’t
seem to have occurred to anyone, but that would have made more
sense. Or perhaps it wasn’t considered Amityville-ish enough.) From
the basement, we are supposed to believe, the priest is exerting an
influence in order to bring his killer to justice....a situation
which raises more than a few questions, not the least being whether
that’s the sort of thing a dead priest ought to be doing –
particularly given the connection that is finally revealed between
killer and victim. On the other hand, I suppose all this might go
some way to explaining the extremely half-hearted nature of the
phenomena that we witness: demonic manifestations they ain’t.
Nevertheless, various occupants have come and gone in the years
since the murder, so presumably it’s all been enough to frighten
people away. The house, we understand (and there is a continual
attempt by the screenplay to be “franchise-like”, by insisting that
“the house” is doing everything), is searching for someone that can
act as a medium for the forces at work within it. It gets what it
wants when Debbie leads Marvin, not to the Amityville property they
intended to inspect, but to one that lies a different way, a house
that she recognises from her dreams.... But Debbie isn’t the only
one upon whom a strange influence is being exerted: as we shall
learn, another of the characters is intimately involved with the
history of the house....
It is a mark in the
favour of The Amityville Curse that its characters are adults
with adult concerns – marriage, home ownership, running a business –
rather than the usual crowd of moronic teenagers. Granted, none of
this is particularly compelling, nor is it particularly
well-executed, but at least it makes a change. It is also easier to
believe than usual that these particular people might actually be
friends, particularly in terms of the lightly touched-in background
that implies that Debbie, Abigail and Bill have been close since
college, and that Frank and Marvin have married into the situation.
The extrovert/introvert pairing of Abigail and Frank is also quite
credibly sketched. But the focus is upon Debbie and Marvin, whose
co-enabling relationship is easily as disturbing as any of the
supernatural goings-on within the house.
Marvin, in his
smug, know-it-all way, is a predator, exploiting Debbie’s lack of
self-esteem and her ambivalence about her psychic abilities to keep
her in a state of dependence. All this is bad enough – and, sadly,
familiar enough – in itself, but it is made infinitely worse
by the fact that Marvin is a professional psychologist; and indeed,
I’m not sure we’re not supposed to infer that Debbie was once one of
his patients. The arrival of the two at their new home brings the
situation to a crisis, with Debbie’s dreams and visions escalating
to a point where Marvin can neither ignore them nor ridicule his
wife out of her belief in them. (“Marvin, you’re not listening
to me!” protests Debbie, only to have him respond with a
condescending sigh, “The doctor is in.”) That point reached, he does
his best instead to drug her out of them: Debbie spends
longer and longer under the influence of sleeping pills, a state
that results in more and more dreams, which in turn, ironically,
drive her further and further from Marvin. (The alacrity with which
Marvin dispenses painkillers and sleeping pills to all and sundry is
just one of his many sterling qualities.) Still, Debbie isn’t
guiltless in all of this. While part of her rightly resents her
husband’s behaviour, the other part still needs a crutch –
psychological as well as pharmacological. And although she cannot or
will not bring herself to stand up to her husband, you get the
feeling that one of the main pleasures that Debbie takes in having
her friends around is that they say out loud to Marvin all the
things that she thinks but doesn’t verbalise. (Another piece
of credible characterisation: the film’s depiction of a group of
friends dealing with the fact that one of their number has married a
jerk.)
While this
uncomfortable human interaction is going on, “the house” is also
making its presence felt – after a fashion. It is indicative of how
little the supernatural aspect of this story has to do with
anything, that what ought to be the heart and soul of any Amityville
film here feels like tacked-on time-wasting. Most of the film’s
lacklustre scare scenes involve the house’s psychic persecution of
Debbie: her encounter with something that tries to force its
way out of the confessional; her repeated glimpses of a youth, first
seen standing silently by the house with his dog, and eventually as
a lifeless body hanging from the branch of a tree; the writing that
appears in the condensation on her bathroom mirror. Elsewhere,
cribbing but inverting the situation in The
Amityville Horror, the clocks in the house stick stubbornly
at 9.00pm, the time of the original murder; as events in the film
reach their climax, they suddenly click back to life. Bill is
attacked in his sleep by a tarantula that appears from nowhere (an
incident he rather bafflingly fails to mention to his friends,
beyond commenting on a “rough night”: perhaps he doesn’t know that
tarantulas aren’t native to Long Island). Abigail finds herself
bathing in blood; books throw themselves off shelves (all the better
to reveal a photograph hidden in one of them); and the latest
entries in Debbie’s dream-journal are not in her hand, and are
written in Latin. The only group experience comes when Bill
interferes with the confessional stored in the basement, and this
consists of nothing worse than windows blowing open and doors
blowing shut.
These events may
leave the viewer entirely unmoved, but they disturb the characters
sufficiently that getting out of the house for a while seems like a
good idea; and at long last The Amityville Curse gets going.
The friends head for a local bar, where we get one of the film’s
very few attempts at connecting itself with its franchise brethren
as – while Bill, Abby and Debbie bravely tackle The Flattest Beer In
The History Of Alcohol – Marvin endears himself to a couple of
elderly locals by blithely dismissing Amityville’s record of
violence and hauntings as “mass hysteria, pure and simple”. One of
the cornered men mutters about, “That kid, killed his family; he
was possessed”, while the second one turns a baleful glare upon
Marvin and growls, “I’ll tell you one thing plain and simple,
mister: you don’t know shit!” – and succeeds, for one
brief, glorious moment, in wiping the self-satisfied smirk from
Marvin’s face. Meanwhile – death is about to return to the
rectory....
We have already met
Mrs Moriarty in her original role of church secretary. It was also
she who found the priest’s body, after which – as a police detective
will soon put it – she “came unscrewed”. If the screenwriters
managed to underwrite almost everything in this film, when it came
to Mrs Moriarty they made up for their previous restraint by going
completely over the top. I mean, I’m sure that they were going for
“lovably eccentric” here, but they rather overshot the mark: so
broadly drawn is Mrs Moriarty that when she forces herself upon the
notice of the new owners of the rectory, you almost expect her (as
did Jack Elam in Support Your Local Sheriff!) to introduce
herself as “the town character”. Oblivious to Marvin’s hostility,
and the not-quite-concealed amusement of the others, Mrs Moriarty
sails into the house one afternoon on the pretext of searching for a
cat, and makes a bee-line for Debbie, with whom she instantly claims
some kind of kinship, and who she presents with a crucifix. Then,
the next morning, while all but Debbie are out, and she is
still trying to shake off the effects of her latest handful of
sleeping pills, Mrs Moriarty wanders in again with a gift of
flowers....and ends up sprawled at the bottom of the basement
stairs, her neck broken....
(To those that
accuse The Amityville Curse of being without any
virtues, I say – behold! A film that kills off its Odious
Comic Relief©! And only two-thirds through its
running-time, too!)
If one aspect of
The Amityville Curse sums the film up more than any other, it is
the death of Mrs Moriarty, which is due not to any supernatural
agency, but to a good old-fashioned human shove. This is revealed to
the police via Marvin’s accidentally-started camcorder (and how is
this film dated by the fact that Marvin’s obsessive filming is meant
to be obnoxious, not normal?), and sends the detective speeding back
to the house just as the characters have finally had enough
and are trying to leave. But certain elements inside the house,
human and otherwise, aren’t having any of that....
The Amityville
Curse as much a murder mystery as it
is a haunted house story. Its supernatural events, such as they are,
are all geared towards revealing the identity of the priest’s
killer, something that the screenwriters evidently felt was not made
sufficiently obvious to the audience via the clues planted in the
script. In this they were, to put it mildly, mistaken. The one truly
remarkable thing about The Amityville Curse is that the
identity of its human villain is SO VERY FRICKIN’ OBVIOUS. Indeed,
SO VERY FRICKIN’ OBVIOUS is it, that for most of the film it
functions as an elaborate double bluff: the audience is, naturally,
so unable to believe that any film could make its “secret villain”
SO VERY FRICKIN’ OBVIOUS, that it assumes that all the apparent
evidence of the villain’s identity could only be a red herring.
Thus, when the killer is at length revealed to be THE ONE PERSON WE
SUSPECTED ALL ALONG, it actually functions as a perverse kind of
plot twist.
However, apparently
suffering under the delusion that he had in fact managed to conceal
the killer’s identity, director Tom Berry decided to cross all his
‘t’-s and dot all his ‘i’-s by adding one more dream sequence for
Debbie, in which she relives the murder – including the entire
five-minute conversation between the priest and his killer that led
up to it. Waking in full possession of the facts – and hence finally
catching up to the impatient viewer – Debbie heads down to the
confessional, where the killer is waiting.
The final ten
minutes or so of The Amityville Curse have so much more
energy and conviction about them than the rest of the film, you
can’t help suspecting that this is the film that its creators
actually wanted to make, before the project was hijacked by the
demands of its franchise. In any case, at the moment when Debbie
steps into the basement of the rectory, The Amityville Curse
stops being a haunted house story. It even stops being a murder
mystery. It becomes, instead, a slasher film.
One of the more
pleasant aspects of The Amityville Curse is the performance
of Dawna Wightman as Debbie. The character is sometimes a bit of a
problem, given how much time she spends panicking or whimpering or
snivelling – understandably, but it still grates – but when she
isn’t doing any of those things, Debbie is quite sweetly likeable.
We don’t necessarily suspect her of having backbone, however; but
when this worm turns, she turns with a vengeance. Defending herself
against an implacable adversary, Debbie doesn’t muck around: paint
thinner to the face, a saw-blade to the leg, a nail gun
everywhere....and when her opponent goes down for the first
time, she doesn’t put her weapon down!! YES!!
By the time the
police arrive at the rectory, the battle is all over; and as is
usually the case in slasher films, it is the ladies who emerge
victorious – although not before the traditional Amityville
front-door-blown-off-its-hinges-by-supernatural-forces. Debbie and
Abigail then come staggering down the stairs, the two new widows
exhausted, bloody and battered, and with their arms tight around one
another....and never mind that one of them has just widowed the
other by driving something pointy through her husband’s body. There
is one more vague attempt here to posit “the house” as an entity
with its own inhabiting spirit, but the words that linger come from
the police detective, as he reacts in disgust to a photographer’s
lunge at the two survivors. “Ah, Christ,” he mutters, “it’s starting
up all over again – and just when the tourists were starting to
come back.”
Which, considering
the nature of most of the “tourism” that these films have brought to
the unfortunate community of Amityville, and the reaction of the
residents to it, might be sarcasm, or irony, or just plain
disingenuity. For the first and only time in The Amityville Curse,
here the film-makers’ intentions aren’t perfectly clear.... |
Director:
Tom Berry