My brother has told me that he thinks my better reviews are the ones where I, in his words, "really put the boot in" to the film. He will, therefore, be very happy to learn that with today's review of The Amityville Asylum, I'm not so much "putting the boot in" as I am taking it around the back of the barn with a shotgun.
After being reminded, once again, of the 1974 shotgun murders of the DeFeo family in their house in Amityville, we start off in 2013, where Lisa Templeton is beginning her new job as a cleaner at the High Hopes Mental Hospital. The job seems easy enough, but from her first night on the job Lisa starts to see and experience strange and unsettling things, including an unpleasant orderly who likes to abuse his power and a mysterious young girl she sees wandering the halls. And then there's Ward X, where the violent criminally insane patients are held - one of whom seems to know a lot about Lisa that she shouldn't know. As the number of strange incidents continue to grow, Lisa begins to investigate the asylum's history and discovers that the asylum is built on the spot where the house at 112 Oceans Avenue once stood. Why was this particular site chosen to be the site for the asylum, and how does Lisa tie into everything that's going on?
The Amityville Asylum is a British film that's supposed to be taking place in America but was clearly filmed in the UK (Wales, to be exact) with an English cast, some of whom try to speak in American accents in the film with varying degrees of success. It also has a completely artificial connection with the Amityville series, in that you could easily remove all mentions of Amityville and the DeFeos and the film wouldn't have been any different. Much like The Amityville Curse, it feels like the Amityville stuff was added in solely to cash in on the infamous franchise. It's also not very good.
The plot moves along at a glacial pace from start to finish. At one point we get a five-minute scene where Lisa is shown every cleaning utensil and bottle of cleaning fluid that she'll need to use in her job - which perhaps wouldn't have been too bad if any of it had had any bearing on the plot later on. But no, it's nothing more than padding, and possibly not even that, as the plot and dialogue feel slow and amateurish. Characters will randomly spout exposition for no reason other than the writer could come up with no other way to insert backstory or other important information, and sometimes they'll do it twice in case we were asleep the first time it was mentioned (five minutes previously). And the "plot twists" at the end of the movie are so incredibly obvious that you can probably guess what they are just from knowing the basic plot mentioned above.
The film's low budget is painfully obvious, from the complete lack of any outside shots until one at the very end of the film, to the deserted and seriously understaffed "mental hospital" (which looks just like the corridors of an office building) because there was clearly no money for any extras. They didn't have time for more than one take for most of the shots too, apparently, as one character can't even pronounce "Amityville" yet they let her go on saying it wrong without trying for a second take, over and over again. And then there's the backstory of the Native American tribe said to have been slaughtered on the site in the 18th century (100 years later than the story given in every other Amityville movie). We're told that they practised witchcraft and human sacrifice with a focus on the number 6, which sounds suspiciously... Hollywood Satanist even before you see the inverted pentagram carved on Eileen Daly's forehead.
I try in reviews to come up with at least one good thing to say about the film, but today it's hard. Some of the cast at least try, I guess? Not all of them succeed, but at least there's someone making the effort. The entire film, though, is just a mess. If I hadn't seen that the director (and writer, producer and composer) has well over a dozen films listed on IMDB, I'd honestly have thought this was a film student's very first effort at making a film. So I guess we've found a film that makes The Amityville Curse look appealing, and makes me worry about what the next film on this list is going to be like...
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