Amitville: It's About Time (1992)

AKA Amityville 1992: It's About Time.

Well, brace yourself for some very surprising news because this Amityville sequel is almost, ALMOST, an entertaining movie. Compared to the two crap movies that preceded it, it's a veritable masterpiece.

It's based on the same source material as the earlier, horrible movie about the evil escaping the famous Amityville home in the guise of a lamp but this time evil escapes the famous Amityville home in the guise of a clock. Not much better, you might be thinking, and it's a fair assumption. However, this time around there is no attempt to show the demonic force physically inhabitng the household object. Instead, we have a mixture of evil taking over a household while some time trickery is used to keep people on their toes.

Stephen Macht plays Jacob Sterling, a man who unwittingly brings a piece of Amityville horror into his home when he brings a large clock back from one of his many work trips. Things quickly start to become quite strange for Jacob, as well as for his son, Rusty (Damon Martin), and his daughter, Lisa (Megan Ward). When Jacob is savagely attacked by a neighbourhood dog he has to rest up at home and enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend, Andrea (Shawn Weatherly), which adds further tension.

I'm not going to try and tell anyone that this is a great movie. Because it's not. But I will try to tell people that this is a good movie. It has lots going against it, the actors aren't the best in the world and the script by Christopher DeFaria and Antonio Toro isn't that interesting, but director Tony Randel also paces everything perfectly and includes that savage dog attack, a transition from plain Jane to sexy siren for Megan Ward and one or two decent moments of gory fun.

None of the leads - Macht, Martin, Ward, Weatherly - are unbearably bad, it's just that they're not all that great either. Jonathan Penner and Nita Talbot do a bit worse because they're given some more outrageous moments but this is compensated for by a very brief cameo from the great Dick Miller.

So, basically, this is far from the worst movie with the Amityville name attached to it. Which isn't saying a lot, I know, but it's not a bad little chiller.

5/10

http://www.amazon.com/Amityville-About-Time-Stephen-Macht/dp/B000ARTMSO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347550535&sr=8-1&keywords=amityville+its+about+time

Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989)

Well, well, well, if I thought that the third Amityville Horror movie was bad I should really have reserved my final judgment until seeing this film and, indeed, the sequels that would come after it. I'm now quite apprehensive about my future visits to Amityville but I've started so I'll have to finish. It's my OCD and if things just keep getting worse and worse well . . . . . . . . maybe I'll save some other poor soul from my fate and it will all be worth it.

As you might have guessed from the title, Amityville: The Evil Escapes, this movie relocates the horror of the first few movies. The evil from Amityville does, indeed, escape. But how would it make such an escape? Possessing an unsuspecting visitor? Staying indoors while some rich ghosthunter moves the entire house across the country? A portal of some kind? No, the evil essence of Amityville puts itself into a . . . . . . . . . lamp.

It's hard to take a horror movie seriously when the main icon of evil is an upright lamp so fair play to writer-director Sandor Stern (and John G. Jones, who wrote the book) for sticking to his guns and providing audiences with more lamp-centric horror than they probably ever knew that they wanted. Of course, the movie is preposterous AND pretty dull and just downright bad. I was initially going to put all of the blame onto Stern but I now feel a bit guilty for two reasons. 1) The man did write the screenplay for the first movie, proving that he could do a good job with the material. 2) He also wrote and directed the excellent Pin (trust me, seek it out if you like great psychological horror).

The cast are no great shakes and don't do anything to help the weak material. Patty Duke, Jane Wyatt, Fredric Lehne (who is saddled with most of the more ridiculous lines), Lou Hancock, Brandy Gold, Zoe Trilling, Aron Eisenberg, etc, all have at least one laughable moment and none of them manage to give solid performances from start to finish.

There's nothing here to make this movie worth a watch. Not even any of the lowest common denominators - gratuitous nudity or excessive gore. Nope, all we have is an evil lamp. Indeed, the ridiculousness of that sentence really tells you all you need to know about the film.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Amityville-The-Evil-Escapes-DVD/dp/B000A0XTP8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346100249&sr=8-2