As old trash movies become easily accessible in the streaming era, it’s become fashionable to look for hidden gems, to nominate underrated horror films for reappraisal. The “Amityville” series is ripe for this sort of investigation since almost every movie had a negative reception.
The excellent “Amityville II: The Possession” is the clear choice for reappraisal, but I almost (not quite) found another one in “The Amityville Curse” (1990), the fifth entry. Director Tom Berry’s film – which comes from Hans Holzer’s novel of the same name (part of the fictional continuation of the lore in book form) — is the first of the straight-to-video “Amityvilles.”
It’s a step up in production value from the utterly unscary TV movie “Amityville 4.” The haunted house (in Amityville, but it’s not the original house, which was destroyed in part three) has a horror mood thanks to the set design, lighting and cinematography. For a while, “Curse” is a blandly standard haunting as we get to know the five friends who bought the house to fix it up and flip it.
“The Amityville Curse” (1990)
Director: Tom Berry
Writers: Michael Krueger, Norvel Rose, Doug Olson; Hans Holzer (book)
Stars: Kim Coates, Dawna Wightman, Helen Hughes
On Tuesdays this summer, RFMC is looking back at selected films in the “Amityville” series.
At least it’s better than the last one
Dawna Wightman’s Debbie brings the series back to its template of women stealing the show, following Margot Kidder and Diane Franklin. The often nightgown-glad Wightman gives a throwback Seventies horror turn with a lot of screaming. The clairvoyant Debbie is haunted by her dream visions, horrified as she scribbles in her dream journal upon waking. Debbie has an adult grip on her sense of self as she works through this issue, so I think of her as a Final Woman more than a Final Girl.
“Curse” reminds me of “Sleepaway Camp” in that it points to only one villain throughout yet is structured like a whodunit – not confirming the villain till the final reveal. For subtle reasons, it’s effective in “Sleepaway Camp,” but not here. This has to do with the explanation of motive.
(SPOILERS BEGIN HERE.)
Top-billed Kim Coates, a cult-favorite actor who resembles Quentin Tarantino, plays Frank. Twelve years earlier, he had killed his biological father, a priest (Jan Rubes) – mad at him for secretly fathering him, then being a deadbeat dad.
Although you can’t go wrong with murders in confessional booths, this motivation is bland, revealed at a moment when “Curse” needs a great twist to elevate and redefine it. Also it raises the question of why Frank would return to the priest’s house. It’s possible (although unlikely) that he doesn’t know this fixer-upper is the priest’s abode, but he at least knows it’s in Amityville, near the church.
Since Frank never seems to want to be there (even for the financial incentive of getting in on a good house-flipping deal), why does he come along? His wife (Cassandra Gava’s Abigial) is there too, but it’s clear that Frank has decision-making power.
(END OF SPOILERS.)
Missed opportunities for commentary
The issue I discussed in the spoiler section is joined by another element that leaves “Curse” short of overlooked-gem status: the leader of the friends, Marvin (David Stein). Along with Wightman and Coates, Stein is one of three good actors, providing gravitas as the psychiatrist husband of Debbie. One can imagine Orson Welles playing him if the film was older.
Writers Michael Krueger, Norvel Rose and Doug Olson miss an opportunity here to be clever or satirical about how Marvin thinks he knows everything but actually is oblivious. Instead, they present this fact bluntly, as they do with the element I mentioned in the spoiler section and the real-estate speculation.
It’s a yuppie get-rich-quick scheme from a cynical perspective, but the quintet is fixing the place up in a fairly respectable manner, aiming to earn their money through elbow grease. It’s just a plot device to get victims into the haunted house. A sharper movie might’ve peppered in a sly parallel between house-flipping and cranking out direct-to-video sequels.
“The Amityville Curse” comes close to being good but doesn’t rise above mediocre. Thanks to Wightman and the production design, it settles for being watchable. That’s a win for a movie that rates a 3.0 on IMDb and ranks low on most lists of “Amityville” films.