After the cinematic dead fish that was Amityville 3-D, the Amityville franchise was left alone for a few years. But as we've seen too many times, there's always someone who can't leave a rightfully-dead series well enough alone, and so Amityville: The Evil Escapes (sometimes seen with an optional 4) was released as a TV movie.
On a dark and stormy night (again, and really?) a small posse of priests turn up at 112 Ocean Avenue to perform a mass exorcism. On the face of it, everything seems to have gone well, but unbeknownst to all but one young priest the evil in the house has just jumped ship into a lamp, which then gets sold at a yard sale and shipped to a family in California. Once it arrives, it doesn't take the evil lamp long to make itself at home - soon it's putting parrots in toaster ovens, turning the garbage disposal unit on just as a hunky boy is sticking his hand down it, and making the youngest daughter of the family think that the lamp is actually her recently-dead father. Will Father Kibbler, the priest who saw the evil enter the lamp during the exorcism, be able to get to this new family and save them from the lamp before it's too late?
So. Evil lamp. Well, this franchise ran out of ideas fast, didn't it? The film's credits claim that Amityville: The Evil Escapes was based on the book of the same name, but none of the short stories in that book were actually used for this movie's story. Ah well. The movie barely has a handle on the series' continuity, after all (how is the house even standing and fully furnished after the massive fireball that erupted from it at the end of the last movie?), so should we really be surprised that it doesn't know where its plot comes from?
To be fair though, the lamp does look suitably creepy - like the killer from The Snowman went and crucified an ent. It's creepy enough on its own, in fact, that the addition of the demonic eyes and nostrils that periodically appear in the "head" globe actually makes it look absurd and somehow less scary. So it's safe to say that the SFX are about on par for your average late-80s TV movie - which is to say they're not very good (although they still look better than Amityville 3-D).
Perhaps because it was a made-for-TV movie, Amityville: The Evil Escapes manages to be both faster-paced and also utterly tame at the same time. Not counting the time it took for the lamp to travel from the East Coast to the West Coast, the majority of the movie's events take place over three or four days, which has to be a new record for this series... yet the lamp can only manage to kill four people (that's including the parrot), amputate a hand and stab someone in the shoulder. Perhaps it was just feeling jetlagged after its cross-country trip, or maybe we just didn't see all the delivery people it massacred along the way.
The movie's high point is a strange one as well. It involves a 50something female housekeeper having an impromptu duel with a teenage boy who is accidentally wielding a possessed chainsaw. And this isn't even a climactic scene in the film; instead it happens at about the halfway point of the film and appears to have been added solely to insert some mild tension between the matriarch of the family and her daughter and grandchildren (because of course, she's going to blame the boy for playing with the chainsaw). It's all a bit of a disappointment, really.
Today's review is a little shorter than usual because, really, there's very little that can be said about Amityville: The Evil Escapes. It's bland: not the worst film in the series but far from the best either. Very little happens in it that's worth remarking on unless you count the fact that the film manages to forget that there's a dead body under the house by the time it ends - I'd like to see them explain that to the police when it's eventually discovered. It's as though even the film was so bored with things that it forgot what had happened, which is never a good sign for a film...
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