Horror Movie Review: The Amityville Curse (1990)

The Amityville Curse does what many a franchise has done & drops the number. I suspect that it wanted to distance itself from the 4th film, The Amityville Horror: The Haunted Lamp. This is the 5th Amityville movie & has the honour of being guaranteed to be at least scarier than the last!

As the movie opens we see a house in the background and it’s clearly not 112 Ocean Avenue, the Amityville House. Yep, after the car crash that was the evil escaping into a lamp in the last movie the creators decided to set this movie in a completely different house. It’s completely unrelated to any of the movies that came before only briefly mentioning the towns super-natural past.

So let’s get this straight:

1 – They dropped the number presumably out of shame.
2 – It’s a completely different house.
3 – It’s unrelated to any of the movies that came before.

So they call it Amityville anyway in the hope of cashing in on the name. Disgraceful.

A group of people buy a rundown house at a really cheap price unaware that it is cursed. Many years before a local priest was murdered during a confession by one of his own congregation. The confessional box has sat in the basement of the house since then.

It doesn’t take long for ghostly goings-on to start with strong winds blowing, lights flickering & other general boring ghost stuff. The dreams/hallucinations are much better as we see all many of spooky images such as bath water turning into blood & a face pushing itself out of the window of the confessional box.

These moments are effective but held together with a bland & boring plot. It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, who killed the priest & why? It just barely makes sense but does pick up nicely in finale as we get a more traditional possession/slasher horror.

The acting is adequate, not something that actively detracts from the overall movie. What does take away from the experience is the poor quality leaving dark scenes really difficult to watch. It’s cheaply made with some really bad make-up (in particular the damage done to one persons face at the end).

There really isn’t much more to say…it’s a boring movie trying to cash in on a series that had already fallen to incredibly low depths. As a haunted house movie it lacks any decent scares only offering the odd creepy moment.