Evil Has a Plug
There are bad sequels, and then there are sequels so bad they feel like a cosmic prank. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes is firmly in the second category—a made-for-TV “horror” movie in which the big threat isn’t ghosts, demons, or cursed real estate, but… a brass floor lamp. Yes, you read that correctly: the evil from the infamous haunted house has decided to hitch a ride across the country in a yard sale lamp that looks like Liberace’s garage sale reject. Forget creaking walls, bleeding ceilings, and flies swarming the windows. Nope—evil now comes with a lampshade.
This is the movie that answers a question no one asked: what if Satan outsourced his haunting to a piece of living room décor?
The Plot (And I Use That Word Generously)
The film opens with priests storming the Amityville house like it’s the climax of The Exorcist. They’re ready to drive out the evil once and for all—except the demonic presence decides to pull a little trick and dive straight into a floor lamp. Father Dennis Kibbler (Fredric Lehne), who’s supposed to be our young, handsome hero, is immediately knocked across the room by said lamp. Yes, the franchise’s big new villain manages to hospitalize a priest without even turning on a light bulb.
Soon after, the lamp ends up at a yard sale, where some poor soul decides to buy it for $100. A hundred bucks! In 1989! For a lamp that looks like it escaped from the set of The Golden Girls. It’s given as a gag gift to Patty Duke’s character Nancy and her family, who have just moved in with grandma Jane Wyatt. And from there, the lamp does what evil lamps do best: kills the parrot, makes the cat homicidal, chops off an electrician’s hand, and even drowns a plumber in sewage.
By the midpoint, the body count is already higher than the wattage of the bulb.
Lamp-Based Horror: A New Low
Let’s talk about the kills for a second. Horror movies thrive on inventive deaths. Jason has his machete, Freddy has his dreamscapes, Michael Myers has his butcher knife. The lamp? It has extension cords and vague “electrical manipulation.” That means we get scenes where an evil power cord strangles people, or the lamp somehow controls the garbage disposal. There’s nothing scarier than watching a household appliance attack like it’s auditioning for America’s Funniest Home Videos.
At one point, the lamp literally phones Father Kibbler to taunt him. Smoke comes out of the receiver, and the phone melts. Yes, the lamp prank calls the priest. What’s next, prank faxing him? Sending a threatening telegram?
Performances: Everyone’s Trying, Except the Lamp
Patty Duke does her best, which is impressive considering she’s forced to act opposite an inanimate object. You can almost see her thinking, “I won an Oscar, and now I’m screaming at a lamp.” Jane Wyatt, playing the grandma, looks like she wandered in from a Murder, She Wrote set and decided to just stay. Fredric Lehne as Father Kibbler is the kind of priest who looks like he should be in a daytime soap opera, not battling demonic lighting fixtures.
The kids are… well, TV kids. The youngest daughter Jessica spends the film whispering to the lamp, believing her dead dad’s spirit is inside it. Which raises the question: if your father’s ghost is trapped in a floor lamp, maybe it’s time to stop praying and start filing a lawsuit against God.
The Grand Finale
Eventually, Father Kibbler comes face-to-face with the lamp for the final showdown. Jessica is brainwashed, Grandma’s fainting, Patty Duke is screaming, and the lamp’s cord is whipping around like it’s possessed by the spirit of a drunk python. The exorcism nearly fails—until Grandma simply picks up the lamp and throws it out the window. It shatters on the rocks below.
That’s right: the epic battle of good and evil ends with a grandmother yeeting a lamp onto a cliff. Evil vanquished by upper body strength and a good throwing arm. Take that, Satan.
But of course, the franchise can’t resist a cheap sting ending. We see the family’s cat, Pepper, possessed by the leftover evil. Because nothing says “terrifying” like a housecat that might stare at you slightly harder than usual.
Why This Is So Bad It’s Almost Genius
You almost have to respect Amityville 4 for its sheer laziness. Instead of building tension in the haunted house, the filmmakers decided, “What if we just FedEx’d the evil to California?” They took the most mundane object possible—a lamp—and said, “Yes, this will be our villain.” Somewhere, Ed Wood is nodding in approval.
The movie tries to wring terror out of everyday electrical appliances. A toaster oven. A garbage disposal. A phone line. It’s like the producers saw Poltergeist and thought, “But what if we made it dumber?”
And yet, there’s something weirdly entertaining about how absurd it is. You’re never scared, but you are constantly thinking, “I can’t believe they actually filmed this.” It’s less horror and more unintentional comedy.
Dark Humor Observations
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Six priests enter the Amityville house to exorcise it. The demon bypasses them all and hides in a lamp. This is why evil wins—it has better survival instincts.
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The lamp kills a parrot by sticking it in a toaster oven. Hitchcock had The Birds. Amityville has The Bird Gets Baked.
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The plumber’s death: drowning in sewage. Nothing supernatural about that—just a metaphor for the entire script.
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Patty Duke spends half the film glaring at the lamp like it owes her rent money.
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The final twist is the cat being possessed. Imagine Pet Sematary if Stephen King had replaced the dead kid with a slightly crankier tabby.
Final Thoughts: Lights Out
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes isn’t scary, it isn’t clever, and it barely qualifies as horror. But it is unforgettable in its sheer audacity to think an evil lamp could carry a 90-minute film. It’s the kind of movie you watch late at night, half-drunk, and wonder if you dreamed it.
The Amityville franchise was already scraping the bottom of the barrel by its fourth entry, but this movie doesn’t scrape—it drills a hole in the barrel, crawls inside, and tries to light the way with a possessed floor lamp.
