By 1983, the Amityville house had already burned through more sequels and spinoffs than most suburban cul-de-sacs burn through “For Sale” signs. You’d think by then audiences would have grown tired of the Dutch Colonial with the beady-eyed windows, but no. Hollywood—much like the evil entity under the floorboards—just kept dragging the corpse of this franchise back into theaters. Amityville 3-D, directed by Richard Fleischer, may not have impressed critics when it landed, but watching it today with the hindsight of forty years and a taste for vintage schlock, you realize something: this movie is bad in the right way. It’s entertaining in spite of itself. Or maybe because of itself.
It is, in other words, the cinematic equivalent of a Ouija board you find in a garage sale. You know it probably won’t work. But you take it home anyway. And sure enough, once you start messing with it, things get weird.
The Plot: Flies, Fire, and Family Drama
Let’s not pretend this movie is hiding a complicated narrative. Amityville 3-D introduces John Baxter (Tony Roberts), a journalist determined to debunk paranormal scams. Naturally, he decides the best way to prove ghosts aren’t real is to move into a house where everyone knows ghosts are real. This is the horror-movie equivalent of saying, “I’ll prove lions aren’t dangerous by moving into the zoo enclosure.”
Once John signs the deed, the house wastes no time flexing its demonic muscles. Real estate agents die covered in flies. Elevators plummet. Cameras capture faces of the damned. And John, like every horror protagonist worth his salt, chalks it all up to coincidence. By the time his daughter Susan (a fresh-faced Lori Loughlin, years before college bribery scandals) drowns in the family motorboat, you start to wonder whether John’s skepticism is just willful stupidity.
Things escalate into full-blown hellfire by the climax: paranormal investigators storm the house, a demon bursts out of the basement well like a bat out of… well, hell, and the house self-destructs in a whirlwind of cheap but enthusiastic 3-D effects. It’s absurd, overblown, and utterly delightful.
3-D: The Real Demon Here
This was 1983, smack in the middle of Hollywood’s brief, desperate flirtation with 3-D. Every other film that year seemed to have an extra dimension stapled to it—Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th Part III, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. The technology was clunky, the glasses made you look like a deranged accountant, and the effects were rarely convincing.
And yet, there’s a goofy charm to watching Amityville 3-D throw flies, fireballs, and glowing ectoplasm directly at the audience. It’s a film that doesn’t just break the fourth wall—it launches flaming debris through it. Every time something lunges toward the camera, you can almost hear the director muttering, “That’ll shut up the critics.”
Is the 3-D good? Absolutely not. But it’s sincere. And sincerity counts for something when you’re watching a glowing fly buzz straight into your popcorn.
The Cast: Before They Were Household Names
One of the real joys of Amityville 3-D lies in spotting the cast.
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Tony Roberts, best known as Woody Allen’s sidekick, plays John Baxter with the detached bemusement of a man who signed on before reading the script.
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Tess Harper (later to appear in Tender Mercies and Crimes of the Heart) gives Nancy, John’s estranged wife, more gravitas than the role deserves.
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Candy Clark plays Melanie, John’s ill-fated partner, with wide-eyed terror that feels just right.
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Robert Joy chews scenery as Dr. Elliot West, the paranormal investigator who gets flambéed by the demon like yesterday’s barbecue.
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And then there’s Meg Ryan, making her feature film debut as one of Susan’s teenage friends. Yes, Meg Ryan—America’s sweetheart—once played second fiddle to a possessed well in the basement of a haunted house.
It’s the kind of cast that makes you pause the movie every five minutes just to say, “Wait… is that who I think it is?”
The House as Character
The real star, of course, is 112 Ocean Avenue. By the third movie, the house has gone full diva. It doesn’t merely creak or moan—it kills, implodes, and spits demons out of its plumbing. The iconic eye-shaped windows leer at you like they’re in on the joke.
What’s fascinating is that the film doesn’t even pretend the house might be harmless. From scene one, it’s a death trap. If anything, the house feels impatient—like it’s tired of subtle hauntings and just wants to get down to the business of dragging souls into its basement portal.
And why not? If I were a demon trapped in real estate purgatory, I’d get bored of creaky doors too.
Dark Humor Amid the Horror
What makes Amityville 3-D surprisingly enjoyable is its unintentional dark humor. Characters die in ways so ludicrous that you can’t help but laugh. Clifford, the doomed realtor, is devoured by flies so aggressively it looks like he fell asleep in a compost bin. Melanie discovers spectral faces in her photographs only to immediately die in a flaming car crash—as if the universe itself was trying to say, “Nope, that’s enough detective work for you.”
And then there’s Susan’s watery demise, which plays less like a tragedy and more like an ill-planned boating commercial. Her mother’s subsequent breakdown, insisting Susan is still alive, has real pathos—but it’s undercut by the fact that the ghost daughter keeps dripping water all over the carpet. You almost want the housekeeper to walk in and scold her for ruining the upholstery.
The finale, with the demon literally belching fire at a roomful of scientists, is so absurd it becomes magnificent. By the time the house begins imploding in 3-D chaos, you’re grinning like a fool.
Why It Works (Sort Of)
Here’s the thing: Amityville 3-D is not a “good” movie in the traditional sense. The pacing is uneven, the special effects are clumsy, and the dialogue often sounds like it was translated into English by a Ouija board.
But as a time capsule of early ’80s horror, it’s glorious. It captures that moment when studios were desperate to cash in on horror franchises, 3-D gimmicks, and supernatural hokum. It’s cheap, loud, and shameless, and somehow that makes it more honest than the slicker haunted house films of later decades.
You don’t watch Amityville 3-D to be scared. You watch it to revel in its excess, to laugh at its absurdity, and to marvel at the fact that Meg Ryan once dodged flying debris in a haunted mansion.
Closing Thoughts
When it was released, Amityville 3-D was panned, dismissed, and mocked. Today, it deserves a second look—not as a horror masterpiece, but as a wonderfully trashy ride through early ’80s horror culture. It’s a carnival haunted house with all the lights left on, a movie that’s more fun to giggle through than to take seriously.
And maybe that’s the secret. For all its flaws, Amityville 3-D doesn’t bore you. It entertains, even if half the time you’re laughing at it instead of with it. In a genre where mediocrity is the true killer, that’s a victory worth celebrating.
