“Amityville” Strikes Again… and Again… and Again
Just when you thought the Amityville franchise had run out of ways to humiliate itself, along comes Amityville Death House—a film so catastrophically inept, it makes Amityville Dollhouse look like The Exorcist.
Directed by B-movie veteran Mark Polonia, written by John Oak Dalton, and featuring Eric Roberts phoning in his lines from what sounds like a Motel 6 bathroom, this twelfth (!) film inspired by The Amityville Horror is the cinematic equivalent of finding an old, moldy fruitcake in the back of your fridge: nobody asked for it, it smells like death, and yet, here it is—again.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a Lifetime movie got possessed by a Spirit Halloween clearance bin, you’ve found your answer.
The Plot (Or Something That Sort of Resembles One)
We begin in the 17th century, because apparently someone decided The Crucible needed a $10 sequel. Abigail Wilmont, a white witch with a gift for looking perpetually annoyed, moves to Amityville after being run out of Salem. When her magic fails to heal a sick child, the locals do what all sensible colonial townspeople do: they hang her for witchcraft.
Cut to the present day, where a “Dark Lord” (played by Eric Roberts, or at least his disembodied voice after he cashed the check) uses a tarot deck and a “Book of the Dead” to resurrect Abigail’s ghost. This is accomplished via the magic of green screen, awkward pauses, and what appears to be a smoke machine borrowed from a middle school production of Macbeth.
Meanwhile, a group of idiots—sorry, friends—are on their way back from a humanitarian trip to Florida (which, let’s be honest, is horrifying enough). Tiffany Raymond (Kyrsten St. Pierre), our heroine, decides to visit her grandmother Florence, who lives in Abigail’s old house. Florence, who’s about three diary entries away from a nervous breakdown, spends her days muttering about witches while surrounded by props that appear to have been purchased at Party City’s “Haunted Discount” section.
Soon, Abigail’s ghost starts picking off descendants of the people who killed her. These descendants include Florence, Tiffany, and a bunch of random townsfolk we never meet long enough to care about. The deaths are mostly implied, off-screen, or acted out with the enthusiasm of a community theater rehearsal gone wrong.
Things escalate when Tiffany rips her shirt open to reveal that she has six breasts—because nothing says “supernatural heritage” like a biological anatomy lesson from hell. Apparently, this means she’s a witch. Somewhere, The Witch (2015) is looking on in disgust.
From there, the film becomes a chaotic blur of possession, bad CGI, and dialogue so wooden you could build the Amityville house out of it.
The Acting: Eric Roberts vs. Sanity
Eric Roberts, bless him, has made a career out of showing up in films where the craft services table probably paid more than the budget. His role here as “The Warlock” consists entirely of whispering vague threats and looking like he’s trying to remember his lines while ordering a sandwich.
It’s honestly hard to tell if Roberts even met the rest of the cast. Most of his scenes are clearly filmed in isolation, perhaps in another galaxy, and inserted later with all the finesse of a high school PowerPoint presentation.
Kyrsten St. Pierre does her best as Tiffany, but she’s working with dialogue that sounds like it was written by an AI trained exclusively on bad SyFy originals. Michael Merchant (Aric), Cassandra Hayes (Bree), and Houston Baker (Dig) play Tiffany’s friends, whose only defining traits are “alive,” “screaming,” and “soon to be dead.”
And then there’s Yolie Canales as Grandma Florence, who delivers every line with the energy of someone desperately trying to remember if she turned the stove off.
The Visuals: Death by Stock Footage
Polonia’s direction has all the subtlety of a brick through a window. The film’s cinematography alternates between “shot on a camcorder in 2003” and “filmed through a potato.” Every scene is overlit, under-edited, or framed as though the cameraman was attacked mid-shot by a raccoon.
The CGI—oh dear God, the CGI—looks like it was rendered on a TI-83 calculator. When Abigail appears as a ghostly entity, she looks less like a spectral threat and more like someone’s screensaver escaped into reality.
There’s also a shocking amount of green screen for a film that takes place almost entirely inside a house. The walls shimmer, the backgrounds flicker, and occasionally an actor’s arm just sort of dissolves into digital mist. It’s like watching The Amityville Horror run on Windows 95.
The Script: Witch, Please
The screenplay by John Oak Dalton seems to have been cobbled together from rejected Buffy the Vampire Slayerfanfiction and Wikipedia entries about witchcraft. The dialogue is delivered in stiff, exposition-heavy bursts that make every scene feel like a community access PSA about hex safety.
Lines like “She has six breasts! That means she’s a witch!” are delivered with deadpan seriousness, as if the film is genuinely proud of its discovery. Somewhere in the background, a sound guy is probably laughing hysterically.
The pacing is equally deranged. Characters spend entire scenes reading from a diary, then screaming, then dying, then coming back possessed. It’s as if the movie itself keeps forgetting what it’s supposed to be doing and just hopes the audience won’t notice.
The Horror: Mostly Existential
Let’s be honest—Amityville Death House isn’t scary. The only terror here is the creeping realization that you’ve willingly spent 90 minutes watching it.
The jump scares are nonexistent, the gore is minimal, and the only thing truly horrifying is the editing. There’s one moment where a character turns into a spider monster, but the effect looks like someone pasted a tarantula GIF over her face using MS Paint.
The film’s climax—if you can call it that—features Tiffany setting Abigail’s diary on fire, causing the entire house to explode like it’s made of C-4 and bad decisions. Somehow, this doesn’t kill Abigail, because the sheriff finds an unburned page and mutters something vaguely threatening about sequels.
It’s a twist ending so nonsensical it almost circles back to genius.
The Humor (Unintentional, But Glorious)
To its accidental credit, Amityville Death House is hysterical. Not intentionally, of course. But between the wooden acting, bargain-bin effects, and lines like “The six breasts mark you as a witch!”, it’s impossible not to laugh.
The movie feels like a drinking game designed by Satan. Every time someone mentions “the diary,” take a shot. Every time the green screen glitches, chug your drink. By the third act, you’ll be drunk enough to see ghosts yourself.
Even the title card looks like it was designed in Microsoft Word using clip art and regret.
The Legacy: Because the Franchise Must Be Stopped
At this point, the Amityville name is less a franchise and more a virus—attaching itself to any script that happens to mention a house. The original 1979 film was iconic, but Amityville Death House feels like it was made by people who once heard about The Amityville Horror through a series of increasingly inaccurate tweets.
It’s proof that you can slap “Amityville” onto anything—Amityville Karen, Amityville in Space, Amityville Shark House—and someone, somewhere, will still fund it.
Final Verdict
★☆☆☆☆ — One Cursed Diary Page Out of Five
Amityville Death House is a cinematic trainwreck wrapped in tinsel and bad lighting. It’s an unholy mashup of witches, warlocks, and wobbly tripods—a movie so bad it could be studied by scientists to understand the collapse of human taste.
And yet… there’s a strange charm to its incompetence. It’s so earnest in its stupidity that you can’t help but admire it. Like a toddler’s finger painting of the apocalypse, it’s bad, but it’s honestly bad.
So if you’re looking for genuine scares, look elsewhere. But if you want to watch a witch with a vendetta, Eric Roberts reading cue cards, and the most confusing anatomy reveal in horror history—then pour yourself some eggnog, dim the lights, and surrender to Amityville Death House.
After all, Christmas comes but once a year—and so, apparently, does this level of cinematic disaster.
