Not exactly. I check out two short indies that cash-in on both the Amityville name and the holiday horror trend. Between these two and Amityville Cop, which takes place on New Year’s Eve, Amityville titles are popping up all over the complete list on my holiday horror page. When will we be getting an Amityville Halloween flick?
AMITYVILLE THANKSGIVING (2022)
This 72-minute movie is such a disaster…but it has a trashy Long Island charm I can totally connect with and even shows actual footage of the town of Amityville and the infamous house as they are today during the opening credits. Not sure if that’s even legal.
The real bummer for me was that it fails to deliver on the Thanksgiving festivities. Like…just make a movie with a damn scene in which a cooked Turkey comes back to life at the Amityville house dining table and attacks guests. Is that too much to ask?
Or better yet, have the Indian burial ground that is supposedly under the house and influenced Ronald Defeo to shoot his whole family get tasty Thanksgiving revenge for what the white men did to Native Americans back in the day.
Instead, this is a roughly acted film about a sleazy Amityville therapist who sends a straight couple to a cabin to work on their sexual problems. This couple is so New York that I couldn’t help but like them—their hokey acting as they argue with New York accents about their intimacy issues is the perfect comical tone the film needed.
I was just disappointed when they find a turkey costume in the cabin, think it was left there by the therapist for their sexual role-playing, and then refuse to put it on. Come on! We need a turkey costume sex scene in an Amityville Thanksgiving movie!
Meanwhile, a private detective is investigating why couples have gone missing after seeing the therapist. We get to see interview videos with some of the couples, including two gay guys discussing their bear identity and getting flirty with each other, which lands this film on the does the gay guy die? page.
The best part is the goomba man in the main relationship getting possessed after they find a Ouija board, tearing off his shirt, and grunting lustfully as he gives his woman the bang she’s been begging for.
After some demonic and satanic revelations, the movie fills the final 20 minutes with interviews of people speculating on what became of the now missing therapist.
Not exactly the Amityville holiday film we can be thankful for, but I’m so there for the sex plot.
AMITYVILLE CHRISTMAS VACATION (2022)
I had high hopes for director/actor/writer Steve Rudzinski’s output after seeing his film Everyone Must Die, but his low budget films have gotten progressively less appealing to me, and going for the “public domain” Amityville name drags his filmography down to a Mark Polonia level production.
Rudzinski uses this film as a vehicle to make himself the focus so he can give us 47 minutes of his humorous charm, which just isn’t sustainable as a virtual one-man show. For instance, his character, Wally Griswold (if you know, you know) wins a Christmas vacation to Amityville, and he gives us an unfunny, too long montage of him packing his bag with silly items while merry Christmas tunes chime.
He then arrives at the Amityville house, only to reveal that he’s staying at a B&B next door. I give him credit for mocking the fact that he’s just totally cashing in on the Amityville name to capture a built-in audience for a movie that isn’t even about the house.
At the B&B, he keeps encountering a female ghost drenched in horror/Christmas red lights, accompanied by an overplayed orchestral sting every time she appears (which could be a parody of how cheap scares are created in all the tween supernatural flicks these days). Steve isn’t scared because he thinks she’s just another guest, and before long they fall in love, she gets kidnapped, and he has to find her.
A few other characters are written in to make it seem like this film isn’t all about Rudzinski’s shtick, but it is. And his shtick can’t quite carry the whole film…but it’s still more entertaining than any of the material he gives to the other actors in the film.
