I am disappointed. I spent two days trying to get hold of a watchable copy of Amityville: Vanishing Point, but I had no luck whatsoever. So I've had to admit defeat - at least for the time being - for reviewing that film and, after a day off, I've skipped to the next film on the list, The Amityville Legacy (which has nothing to do with The Amityville Playhouse). Hopefully, we won't have somehow missed anything vitally important in missing a film out...
After we start, as all these films seem to do, with the DeFeo family massacre in 1974 yet again, we jump forward "40 years" and across the USA to Nebraska, where various family members are gathering together to celebrate patriarch Mark's 50th birthday. One of his birthday gifts is an antique toy monkey that just so happened to have come from the house on 112 Ocean Avenue, and so, of course, it's evil. The monkey wastes no time spreading its influence, and soon Mark is angrily chopping wood, insulting his family and having visions of his dead father telling him to kill them all. Between Mark's descent into murderous psychosis and the fundamentalist grandmother who is beginning to suffer from dementia, will the family survive the weekend?
And here we all thought that we'd left the Yard Sale of the Damned behind several movies ago, didn't we? Admittedly, those old toy monkies with the cymbals are almost always evil and creepy - even the one in Toy Story 3 was creepy (and bore a striking resemblance to this one) - so at least this time around we're not struggling to make a horror movie about an evil lamp or an evil clock. Although the toy monkey actually features very little in the actual movie - it's given to Mark, he cuts his foot on it and then we just see it once or twice more, from various camera angles and sometimes being lit with a red or green light. It doesn't actually do anything in the film.
The Amityville Legacy is also a short film, clocking in at just 66 minutes long, or 59 minutes without credits. 59 minutes! That's not even an hour long. It's certainly not long enough to be classed as a feature film by the rules of the Screen Actors Guild, whose minimum is 80 minutes (although it is according to the Academy of Motional Picture Arts and Sciences, who say that their minimum length is 40 minutes). However, the very least that can be said for The Amityville Legacy is that it doesn't pad out its story unnecessarily. Well, there's some padding, but it's not nearly as bad as we've seen in other films.
You've probably already guessed that The Amityville Legacy is also another zero-budget film, and you're right. Unlike some of the other low-budget films we've seen in the Amityville franchise, however, this film doesn't try to do anything with CGI effects or anything like that. The effects are limited to red and green lights in some of the scenes (mainly the DeFeo murders at the start and Mark's dreams/hallucinations) and a bit of fake blood on a couple of bodies. Oh, and some obviously CG blood splatter once or twice. Even Mark's ghostly father is presented fully solid and walking around like a regular person. It might be a bargain-basement film, but at least it's not trying to do anything above its budget that would just end up looking laughable.
Another thing of note is the inclusion of a gay couple in the film who aren't portrayed as offensive stereotypes or as just cannon fodder for Mark's inevitable killing spree (because the entire family are equal targets there). There are some homophobic comments made about them, but they're from Mark's dead father/the evil monkey and so understandable in context. Oh, and there's a scene of mild BDSM between the couple, but again, it's one of Mark's hallucinations that are supposed to be driving him to kill, so it's understandable in context.
Despite what this review might have implied so far, The Amityville Legacy isn't a good film, but when you look at some of the other films we've watched in the past couple of weeks, it's far from the worst film we've seen. The plot and dialogue are awkward and feel forced for a lot of the movie, with a couple of exposition sledgehammers dropped in at random to try to force plot points and fill in a few minutes before the inevitable shotgun rampage. But it feels like it's at least tried to be aware of its limits and stay within them, and at least some of the characters were relatable. And it was short, which after 14 films is something of a relief.
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