The Sixteenth Layer of Hell: Direct-to-Video Amityville
There are horror movies so bad they’re good, and then there are horror movies so bad they make you question your commitment to life itself. Amityville: Vanishing Point belongs firmly in the latter category — a film so baffling, so unhinged, so utterly allergic to narrative coherence that calling it “a movie” feels generous.
This is the fourteenth (yes, fourteenth) entry in the increasingly cursed Amityville franchise, and by this point, it’s less a series and more an ongoing social experiment in audience endurance. Dylan Greenberg’s film is less about ghosts and more about testing how long you can stare at flashing lights, incoherent dialogue, and art school chaos before your soul begins to leave your body.
It’s The Amityville Horror reimagined by someone who dropped acid during film theory class, binged David Lynch, and thought, “I could do that… but worse.”
The Plot, Allegedly
Trying to describe the plot of Amityville: Vanishing Point is like trying to summarize the fever dream of a possessed Roomba. But here’s my best attempt.
A young woman named Margaret East dies in Amityville, and her death is being investigated by Hank Denton (Jurgen Azazel Munster), a man who oscillates between “FBI agent,” “detective,” and “guy who wandered onto the set with a fake badge.” He’s obnoxious, sweaty, and behaves like a man who’s been drinking expired Red Bull for weeks.
Margaret lived in a Bohemian boarding house owned by a woman named Aphrodite (Selena Mars) and populated by an assortment of characters who appear to have been pulled from an avant-garde theater troupe that lost its way to Burning Man. Her death apparently unleashes both her ghost and a demon — because Amityville needs both, obviously — and soon the boarding house becomes a supernatural funhouse of sex, hallucinations, and bizarre monologues about rats and God.
Denton, our alleged protagonist, starts experiencing “visions” that mostly involve him sweating profusely, screaming at nothing, and having a disturbing sexual encounter where he ejaculates all over the room while staring at a Keith Hernandez baseball card. That’s not a joke. That’s actually in the movie. Somewhere, Keith Hernandez is calling his lawyer.
Meanwhile, Aphrodite’s daughter Bermuda (Mickala McFarlane) and her lover Brigitta (Amanda Flowers) try to figure out what’s happening, which involves séances, ghost VHS tapes, and a trip to the basement — the cinematic equivalent of pressing the “do not press” button.
The rest of the film plays like someone filmed a student art project titled Paranormal Confusion and Other Bad Decisions.There’s a gravedigger named Sardu, a séance attended by people who seem to be improvising their way through a blackout, and a ghost that occasionally pops in to remind you that yes, this is technically still supposed to be about Amityville.
Eventually, people die — I think — and ghosts possess people — maybe — until the finale, where Bermuda and Brigitta escape the chaos and reunite on a train. Whether this is a metaphor for love, loss, or the audience’s desperate wish to leave the movie is anyone’s guess.
Characters: Theatre Kids in Purgatory
The cast of Amityville: Vanishing Point looks like they were recruited from a Brooklyn drag bar five minutes before last call. Which, honestly, might be the movie’s best decision — because if you’re going to make something this deranged, you might as well commit fully to camp.
Jurgen Azazel Munster as Hank Denton deserves a medal for acting like he’s in an entirely different film — a sleazy noir thriller that only exists in his head. His performance vacillates between Nicolas Cage meltdown and community theater Twin Peaks cosplay. He’s so sweaty and manic he might as well be haunted by his own pores.
Selena Mars, who co-wrote the film, plays Aphrodite, the boarding house owner and mother to two daughters who seem perpetually on the verge of either a nervous breakdown or interpretive dance. Mars delivers her lines with the conviction of someone reciting poetry to ghosts that aren’t listening.
Amanda Flowers as Brigitta spends most of her screen time being haunted, seduced, or confused — sometimes all three simultaneously. By the end, when she’s strangling Denton with the help of a ghost, it feels less like vengeance and more like the movie’s way of thanking her for showing up.
And then there’s Mickala McFarlane as Bermuda, who gives us the rare combination of screaming terror and spoken-word confusion. She finds a videotape of Margaret rambling about “the beautiful ones” — apparently inspired by a real-life psychological study about overcrowding and rats — because, sure, why not add sociology to the mix?
Direction: An Acid Trip in a Haunted House
Dylan Greenberg’s direction is what happens when someone feeds an AI all of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and a stack of VHS horror movies from the ’80s — and then deletes the instruction manual.
The cinematography is aggressively unhinged: colors flash like disco lights, scenes cut mid-sentence, and ghost effects look like they were created on Microsoft Paint by a poltergeist with ADHD. There’s no consistency, no pacing, and definitely no concern for whether any of this makes sense.
To be fair, Greenberg seems to be trying for surrealism — the kind of dream logic that made David Lynch famous and art students unbearable. But instead of unsettling poetry, we get a visual migraine scored by a synth keyboard and a camera operator who appears to be filming while falling down the stairs.
At one point, a character’s hallucination involves a floating hand and giant insect legs, which are either metaphors for trauma or evidence that the CGI budget was $12 and a dare.
Script: Written by Chaos, Edited by Satan
The screenplay — co-written by four people, none of whom apparently communicated — reads like it was pieced together from overheard subway conversations. Dialogue alternates between pseudo-philosophical babble (“We are the beautiful ones, blessed by the house!”) and frat-level nonsense (“You’re hot when you’re haunted”).
There are scenes that feel like they were added purely because someone found a prop lying around. A baseball card? Sure. A séance? Why not. A man named “Bacon Cheeseburger”? Of course, and yes, that’s a real character credited in the film.
Trying to follow the story is like playing a Ouija board with a ghost who can’t spell. You might catch glimpses of meaning, but mostly you’re just waiting for the planchette to slide off the table.
Special Effects: The Real Horror
Whatever budget this film had was clearly spent on neon lights and hallucinogens. Ghosts fade in and out like bad Wi-Fi signals. Blood looks like melted fruit punch. One scene involves a demon costume so cheap it could’ve come free with a box of Count Chocula.
And the editing — my God, the editing. Scenes cut randomly mid-sentence, characters teleport, and sound levels fluctuate between whisper and hurricane. Watching Amityville: Vanishing Point feels like being trapped in a VHS player that’s possessed by avant-garde art students.
Symbolism: Maybe? Probably Not.
If you squint, you can almost convince yourself that Vanishing Point is an experimental satire about trauma, sexuality, and the cyclical nature of death. But then someone screams about demons while a guy named “Ranston Cubicle” mumbles existential poetry into a fish-eye lens, and that illusion collapses.
It’s as if the film wants to be a commentary on everything — gender, spirituality, art, rats — and ends up being about nothing. Even the ghosts seem confused about why they’re haunting these people.
Final Verdict: Amityville’s Lowest Point (So Far)
Watching Amityville: Vanishing Point is like staring directly into a haunted lava lamp. It’s bright, noisy, occasionally hypnotic, and ultimately meaningless. It’s not just a bad movie — it’s an endurance test, a surreal anti-film that dares you to find logic where none exists.
But here’s the twist: it’s almost admirably insane. You can’t accuse Dylan Greenberg of playing it safe. This isn’t lazy horror; it’s ambitious incompetence — a psychedelic dumpster fire you can’t look away from.
Grade: F (for “Frighteningly Incomprehensible”)
Recommended for: Experimental film masochists, avant-garde ghost enthusiasts, and anyone who thinks “The Amityville Horror” would’ve been better if it had more baseball cards, demons, and interpretive dance.
