THE AMITYVILLE MURDERS (2018)

Studio:      Skyline Entertainment
Director:    Daniel Farrands
Writer:      Daniel Farrands
Producer:  Lucas Jarach, Daniel Farrands, Eric Brenner
Stars:     John Robinson, Chelsea Ricketts, Diane Franklin, Rebekah Graf, Zane Austin, Noa Brenner, Kue Lawrence, Burt Young, Lainie Kazan, Paul Ben-Victor

Review Score:

---

Summary:

Before “The Amityville Horror,” the notorious Long Island house curses Butch DeFeo to kill his family on a November night in 1974.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Amityville, Long Island, NY – October 26, 1974 – Dawn DeFeo celebrates her 18th birthday at her family’s ‘High Hopes’ house on Ocean Avenue with her parents Ronnie and Louise, older brother Ronnie “Butch” Jr., sister Allison, younger brothers Marc and John “Jody,” and Louise’s parents Michael and Angela “Nonna” Brigante. Nonna becomes concerned when Louise mentions possibly selling the house to move to California.

Dawn takes Butch and their friends Donna Benedettio, Steve Pelskie, and Randy “Beak” Buechler into a hidden room painted red in the basement. There, Dawn shows everyone her grandmother’s grimoire before leading an entrancing séance during which a penny levitates off a plate.

Ronnie breaks up the séance. Ronnie uses the opportunity to beat Butch. When Dawn treats his wounds later, Butch remarks that their father’s abuse will not stop until Ronnie is dead.

Butch spies his father secretly receiving a black bag full of money from two thugs. Butch watches Ronnie hide the bag inside a concealed safe.

Butch begins hearing voices while in his bedroom with distinctive quarter-moon windows. Butch hears the voices again while dropping acid and having sex with Donna in his car outside the house. When Butch has a vision where Donna becomes Dawn, Butch frantically kicks Donna out into the rain and drives away.

Louise feels an ominous presence inside the house before finding Butch’s journal filled with worrisome sketches. Louise also sees a bird die by flying into a window.

Dawn discovers a strange wooden cross on an outside doorknob when she comes home. A man in a black car is seen watching the house from the street.

Complaining of hearing voices, Butch stays home in bed while the rest of the family goes out for Halloween. The house ends up mysteriously ransacked. Ronnie beats Butch when he discovers his money was stolen, but is forced to stop when police arrive.

Dawn and Butch discuss how Butch has been behaving strangely since the séance. Worried that the spirits that used to keep them safe are now angry, the siblings conduct a second conjuring hoping to silence the voices. While Ronnie freaks out about his missing money, a shadow demon is seen inside the house.

November 5, 1974 – Butch continues hearing voices. Dawn tells Butch she saw someone suspicious outside and suspects something bad is going to happen. Butch briefly enters a possessed trance that frightens Dawn.

An invisible presence wakes Dawn at 3:15am. Dawn finds Butch standing entranced in her bedroom. The rest of the family is roused by loud knocks at the door. Ronnie finds no one outside, although the black car is seen driving away.

November 8, 1974 – Steve and Beak witness Ronnie beating Dawn and Louise. Butch stops his father’s violence by putting a shotgun to Ronnie’s neck. Butch pulls the trigger twice, but the gun does not fire.

Dawn tells her mother that Ronnie’s violence has to stop. Louise tells Dawn that the house used to give her premonitions, but now her dreams only show her that the end is coming.

Dawn comes home to find a Virgin Mary statue outside the house. Dawn overhears Ronnie telling Louise that he believes divine intervention prevented Butch’s shotgun from firing. Ronnie and Louise have a fight over how to address their son’s drug abuse and behavioral problems.

Butch shows Dawn the missing money in the red room, but claims he didn’t take it. After telling his sister that he has been watching her, Butch goes on to mention that Native Americans used to banish their outcasts to die on the surrounding land.

Butch and Dawn conduct another summoning. Numerous pennies rise into the air.

Butch warns his sister that she should leave Ocean Avenue. Dawn packs a bag and takes the money to her grandmother’s house.

Butch wakes at 3:15am to find several shadow demons stalking around High Hopes. Butch flees to his room and screams for the apparitions to leave him alone.

November 13, 1974 – Butch has a strange dinner with his family during which he envisions everyone murdered. Butch slashes at his father with a blade before retreating upstairs.

At the Brigante house, Nonna tells Dawn about the Ocean Avenue home’s history with special powers and conjuring. Dawn mentions that she feels as though they are being haunted.

Shadow demons torment Butch and supernaturally pull him into the basement red room. Having gone mad, Butch arms himself with the shotgun and executes his entire family one at a time.

Dawn wakes up at 3:15am. Compelled to look in a box under Nonna’s guest bed, Dawn finds mementos about the Moynihan Family who previously owned High Hopes having been murdered. Dawn also finds a cross like the one seen earlier on the house’s door.

Nonna warns Dawn not to return to Ocean Avenue, but Dawn leaves anyway. Dawn finds her family dead in their beds. Resigned to her fate after seeing her brother entranced, Dawn dons a nightgown and climbs into her bed. Butch shoots Dawn dead.

Police escort Butch from the house in handcuffs. One of the officers secretly passes the moneybag to a thug who hands it to Michael Brigante. Michael rides away in a black car.

Thirteen Months Later – A real estate agent shows the vacant High Hopes house to prospective buyers George and Kathy Lutz.

---

Review:

“The Amityville Horror” is bunk. Not the 1979 movie, or even the 2005 remake, but the bogus “true events” behind the hoax haunting. George Lutz concocted a distinctive ghost story of demon pigs and quarter-moon windows, but the reality remains, the notorious ‘High Hopes’ house on Ocean Avenue is no more cursed than your neighborhood Taco Bell.

However, six murders actually did occur inside the home and are unfortunately all too real. On November 13th, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. executed his unsuspecting parents and four siblings in their beds, inadvertently planting a seed that would sprout into “The Amityville Horror’s” backstory.

It turns out that Butch DeFeo and George Lutz shared more in common than shaggy brown beards. Both men were chronic liars too. In the years during, between, and since his arrest, trial, and incarceration, Butch invented as many explanations for what happened that night as George had stories about fly swarms, red rooms, and hoof prints in imaginary snowfall.

Police initially put Butch into protective custody because he said a mafia hitman targeted his family for assassination. A known drug abuser, Butch flipped on himself when the hitman’s alibi panned out, opting for an insanity defense by claiming voices compelled him to kill. Later, Butch’s bullsh*t shifted to say his sister Dawn killed their father while their mother murdered the other children. Another version of events pinned the crimes entirely on Dawn and an unidentified accomplice. Still another account cited Butch, Dawn, and two friends as taking out their parents to prevent mom and dad from murdering them first.

It’s fitting that Daniel Farrands, making his narrative feature directorial debut here, is the man attempting to craft a sensible story out of phantom whispers, mob connections, and other hogwash associated with Butch DeFeo’s familicide and George Lutz’s drivel. Farrands is the writer whom producers tapped to figure out “Halloween’s” increasingly convoluted continuity, resulting in 1995’s equally convoluted “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers” (review here). If anyone can find a narrative among a load of nonsense, it should be Daniel Farrands.

What Farrands can’t do however, is turn a five-minute event into 95 minutes of filmic fascination. Butch DeFeo simply cracked and killed six people. That leaves “The Amityville Murders” to milk itself into a movie by filling plentiful space with ho-hum hullabaloo. Stale scary movie standards highlighted in the film include a bird flying into a window, a suddenly bursting light bulb, ominous lightning storms, and a whole lot of Butch hearing voices while slowly going mad. Not exactly intense.

Early exposition often plays like deleted material from “The Sopranos” featuring incidental actors too campy to make the final cut. “The Amityville Murders” tries so hard to cement itself in 1970s Long Island that everyone goes overboard on exaggerated New Yawk accents, bouffant ‘dos, and Woodstock wardrobes. Over-the-top efforts earn a few unintended laughs, but mostly trip mines preventing anyone from taking the film seriously as an accurate recreation of the era or events.

As Butch’s abusive, possibly mobbed-up father, venerable character actor Paul Ben-Victor becomes the cast’s sole standout, even though he essentially embodies the same stock goombah gangster he’s been playing his whole career. Burt Young appears in an awkward cameo as Butch’s grandfather. A stretched logic suggestion that he is also a mystery man with a hand in mafia money and the house’s haunting history makes Young’s quick role more confounding.

Speaking of irrelevant inclusions, I challenge anyone to remember the names of Butch and Dawn’s sister or two brothers, or to swear on a Jay Anson novel that they definitively recall seeing them in the movie. Farrands throws in other unnecessary support from Butch’s brief fling and a few forgettable friends. But he loses interest in doing anything substantial that isn’t associated with passing moments of supernatural drabness.

“The Amityville Murders” covers enough bases to be an average at best horror movie. Oddly, that’s good enough to make it exceptional as an “Amityville” film, considering the low bar of quality applied to anything with that word in the title. On the other hand, it’s ultimately redundant since “Amityville II: The Possession” already tells the same story, thereby adding nothing fresh to the pseudo-franchise’s ongoing fiction.

Being based on real people, “The Amityville Murders” introduces an additional problem by partly exonerating Butch DeFeo’s heinous actions with the insinuation that demons made him do it. But questionably tasteless appropriation of true-life tragedies appears to occupy prime real estate in Daniel Farrands’ wheelhouse. Two projects on tap have the titles “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” and “The Haunting of Nicole Brown Simpson.” From their summaries, both apparently combine their respective murders with supernatural encounters, walking a dangerous line between guilty pleasure goodness and offensive exploitation. Imagine what these victims, the DeFeos included, would think if they saw the trivial terror tales that came from their deaths.

Review Score: 40

---