With Amityville Dollhouse we reach the end of the Yard Sale of the Damned portion of the series, presumably because they finally ran out of household items that could plausibly become evil. However, we're still not even halfway through the film series - or at least the list I found on Wikipedia that I'm using as my guide for this review series.
The Martin family - newly-married Bill and Claire, Bill's children Todd and Jessica and Claire's son Jimmy - move into their new home, which Bill built himself. In a shed also on the lot Bill finds a large dollhouse, complete with a set of voodoo dolls in it, that looks just like the old Amityville house we all know and... know. He gives it to Jessica as a birthday present, and we can already see where this is going. The dollhouse is, of course, the equivalent of a voodoo house, and things that happen in the dollhouse also happen in the real house, such as a pet mouse in a bedroom that turns into a giant mouse under Jessica's bed. Meanwhile, Jimmy starts receiving visits from his undead father, who encourages him to kill his step-family while decomposing. Claire starts fantasising about having sex with her step-son Todd and Bill dreams of the house burning down. Thankfully, Bill's sister Marla and her husband Tobias are witches or occultists of some sort, but can they save the family from the evil Amityville spirits in time?
Of all the films I've watched in this series so far, Amityville Dollhouse has by far been the hardest one to track down and watch. I'm quite surprised by this - if anything, I'd have expected something like The Amityville Curse or The Evil Escapes to have been the most obscure and out-of-print/unavailable. Thankfully, I eventually got hold of a copy without needing to spend £20+, which is a good thing as I don't like to spend that amount of money on a film I'll only watch willingly once.
The biggest problem is that, while it has several good ideas, it doesn't really do enough with them - in fact, it has too many good ideas, and so none of them really get enough screen time. The voodoo dollhouse is an original idea, for example, but other than the trick with the mouse, very little else happens with it until the very end when it becomes a Deus ex machina. Jimmy's zombie father gets a little more screen time and he's certainly done better than Evil Lamp Dad from The Evil Escapes, but again it's not enough. Honestly, either of these two ideas could have and probably should have had an entire movie to themselves, but having them share 90 minutes just leaves both of them unfulfilled.
Also, what is this series' fascination with incest? This is the third film out of eight to have it as a plot point, and quite frankly it's getting more than a little creepy. There are plenty of other fetishes and perversions out there, evil Amityville spirits - try branching out a little.
The connection with the original Amityville house is also unclear. Yes, the voodoo dollhouse is based on 112 Ocean Avenue, but there is no explanation as to why it was just sitting in that shed, waiting to be found. How did it get there? Who brought it all the way out to the West Coast (I'm assuming it's the West Coast because the film looks like it's set in a desert-like area) Later on, we're also told that the fireplace in the house was the only thing left after the house that was previously on the lot burned down... but what does that have to do with the Amityville mythos? Is the movie trying to tell us that someone took the fireplace and dollhouse from the original Amityville house in New York, shipped it out to wherever this movie is set, built a house around the fireplace which then burned down, leaving only the fireplace, and then Bill came along and built around it again, no questions asked?
...The worst thing about the above paragraph is that I've apparently put more thought into the continuity than the filmmakers did. Hell, even the poster features the wrong Jessica (and in some versions of it they even managed to forget to replace the Evil Lamp with the Voodoo Dollhouse).
It's really no surprise that the Amityville series became dormant for nearly a decade after this film; not only had they clearly run out of ideas for possessed furniture and housewares (evil fridges, microwaves and washing machines having already been taken by other movies), but interest in both making and watching the films was falling to a new low. And so we all breathed a sigh of relief and forgot about the story of the Amityville house, except maybe when reading books of ghost stories at slumber parties to try to scare each other...
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