THE AMITYVILLE THEATER (2015)

Studio:       4 Digital Media
Director:    John R. Walker
Writer:       Steve Hardy, John R. Walker
Producer:  John R. Walker
Stars:     Monele LeStrat, Linden Baker, Kennie Bennoit, Hollie Anne Kornik, Eva Kwok, Logan Russell, Gary Martin, Ania Marson, John R. Walker

Review Score:

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Summary:

A teenager and her friends become trapped in a haunted theater with a disturbing connection to Amityville’s secret past.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

After her parents die in a fire, teenage student Fawn Harriman inherits The Roxy Theater in Amityville, New York. Family attorney Dorothy Felix assigns surveyor Ed Clayton to assess the property for Fawn, but he is assaulted by an unseen presence in the building’s basement and disappears.

Fawn decides to spend a weekend exploring the theater with her boyfriend Kyle Blaker, her best friend Indy Divani, Kyle’s brother Jevan, and Jevan’s friend Matt Darnell. Meanwhile, high school teacher Victor Stewart begins researching the theater’s history on Fawn’s behalf since he was a friend of her parents.

As the foursome explores the theater, Jevan meets a young goth girl named Wendy Shardlow squatting on the premises. Indy and Matt have a vision of Fawn dying from a balcony fall before being taunted by a ghost. When the group discovers that they have become mysteriously locked inside the theater, Jevan becomes momentarily possessed and bloodies his hand without receiving a wound while futilely attempting to turn a doorknob.

Fawn collapses after having a vision of the theater being inhabited by a ghostly audience during an opera performance. The group uses a Ouija board and communicates with a spirit that spells out the word “sister.” Everyone goes to sleep.

In the morning, the others discover that Jevan went missing during the night. The group hears Indy screaming in another room and discovers her missing, as well. While everyone splits up and searches the theater for the two missing friends, Kyle finally finds Jevan in an odd state, although it is actually a phantom as Jevan’s body is shown to be lying dead in a closet.

Kyle leaves Jevan with Fawn while he searches for a way to break out with Matt and Wendy. Fawn accidentally splashes Jevan with water and deforms his face. Fawn flees only to confront Indy’s ghost before being captured from behind.

Unable to get inside the theater to warn Fawn, Victor takes his research findings to Amityville mayor Elliot Saunders. Victor explains that he believes six people are killed every year on November 13th in a ritual connected to an event where Native Americans inhabiting the land entombed people they believed were possessed by demons. Saunders has a henchman knock Victor unconscious after he makes the revelation.

Victor comes to and finds himself restrained to a chair. The mayor explains that the six demons the Shinnecock Indians trapped were unearthed from the catacombs beneath Amityville. To prevent the demons from surfacing above ground, Amityville secretly sanctions the sacrifice of six souls every year. Saunders further reveals that Fawn’s parents were part of an Amityville cult participating in the sacrifices and volunteered their own first born, who was a twin sister Fawn never knew she had. Saunders unexpectedly shoots his henchman and frees Victor as an act of redemption for Amityville’s ongoing corruption. Saunders then shoots himself after Victor leaves.

Victor makes his way through a bevy of townspeople and uses a key to the city given to him by the mayor to enter the theater. Victor rescues Matt, who leaves the theater after Wendy mysteriously vanishes.

Victor goes further into the building to search for the others. He finds Fawn sitting onstage, but is confronted by the phantoms of Indy, Kyle, and Jevan. When Ed Clayton’s phantom enters, Victor realizes that he and Fawn are planned to be the fifth and sixth sacrifices. The phantoms mysteriously disappear, allowing Victor and Fawn to flee the building. Stopped by a horde of townspeople standing outside the front door, Fawn reveals that she is actually possessed by her sacrificed twin sister Adrienne before attacking Victor and pulling him back inside the theater.

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Review:

Film fans can often develop affinities for franchises that end up with longevities outlasting the quality of the franchises themselves.  As one example, there are those of us who will still see anything branded “Hellraiser” despite knowing full well that the series’ entertainment value has only continued diminishing since going direct-to-video about a half dozen sequels ago.

One of my other Achilles Heels for horror has always been Amityville.  It’s an odd personal predilection to have considering that one, I don’t believe the actual Ocean Avenue home in Long Island was ever haunted, and two, there hasn’t been an Amityville-related movie worth much discussion in maybe 30 years.  Nevertheless, some kernel of nostalgia from childhood, when naivety had me fascinated with the idea that a legitimately haunted house could possibly exist in reality, engrained in me an OCD urge to see anything featuring box art with arched eye windows or devil tail font.

That’s why even with the fair warning of a 2.3 IMDB rating and user reviews including choice phrases such as “stinker,” “cringe-worthy,” “trash,” and “a disgrace,” better sense took a nap in order to give “The Amityville Theater” a go.  Fully primed for an underwhelming experience, I certainly wasn’t expecting the film, titled “The Amityville Playhouse” outside of North America, to be any sort of sleeper hit or mold-breaking stunner.  But even the aforementioned verbal venom had not fully braced me for the dismal 98 minutes that “The Amityville Theater” forces willful viewers to endure.

By some stoke of law-skirting fiction involving minors and property ownership, high school student Fawn Harriman inherits an abandoned theater in Amityville after her parents die in a fire.  Accompanied by her BFF, her sort-of boyfriend, the boyfriend’s brother, and the brother’s random friend, Fawn sets off on an urban explorer weekend to give the cobwebbed old building a look-see.  What she and her friends find is a ghost story hodge-podge of paranormal activity, possession, and ritualistic murder that amounts to zero in the scare department despite everything stirred into the stew.

Meanwhile, a B-plot follows Fawn’s geography teacher Mr. Stewart as he takes it upon himself to research the theater’s haunted history.  In between scenes of the teens’ theater spelunking, viewers are treated to extraneous asides of Mr. Vincent browsing a bookstore, arriving at a library only to find it closed, being stopped at a railroad crossing while waiting for a train to pass, renting a motel room, returning to the library, and reading a whole lot of books just to arrive at a single page telling him everything he needs to know.  Given that Mr. Vincent is played by the film’s director, John R. Walker, I can only assume these scenes are vanity inclusions, as they serve no practical entertainment or story momentum purposes.

The additional inclusion of a pair of facacta backstories set in England and Canada seems designed to get around the fact that the film was shot there instead of actually in Amityville.  It also partially explains why everyone in the cast has an accent from one of those two locations instead of from New York.

Discontent to annoy solely through pointless employment of a handheld camera, “The Amityville Theater” has a confusing desire to place certain scenes out of order.  For instance, the movie starts on an overlong montage of a building surveyor exiting his house, driving into town, and entering the theater basement only to be attacked by something unseen.  What does this unnecessarily long sequence establish other than the director’s confusion over shots required to tell this point of the story?  From there, Fawn tells her sort-of boyfriend about acquiring building keys from the lawyer before the film flashes back again to the lawyer assigning the surveyor to investigate the theater.  Seems like the only sensible explanation for jumbling that thread’s order is to force an off-camera kill as the opener.

Seeing as how the cast is comprised of fresh-faced newcomers, possibly with fragile aspirations of fruitful film careers, “unconvincing” would be a charitable way to describe their acting without crushing unwarranted dreams.  Regrettably, these performances are deserving of criticism with a harsher bite.  I never fully understood the expression “couldn’t act his/her way out of a wet paper bag,” because I don’t quite know how someone would do such a thing in the first place.  Neither does anyone in this movie.

It would be unfair to single out any performance in particular as amateurish, since the acting across the board is uniformly terrible.  The wooden line delivery and expressionless faces might be amusing if it were not heartbreaking to think some of these young greenhorns might believe they have promising futures as professional thespians.  Anyone under any such delusion is in dire need of a Simon Cowell reality check about finding a different line of work.

To breathe some much needed fun into this review, I initially planned on several visual diversions about how one of the actors brings to mind an amalgam of Andy Samberg and Jason Biggs, another looks like a young Joel Kinnaman circa Holder on “The Killing,” and one more resembles makeup artist J. Anthony Kosar from “Face Off.”  Sadly, this movie isn’t worth even the small effort it would take to cut and paste those pictures together.

Nearly unparalleled as abysmal in the subgenre of Amityville films, “The Amityville Theater” manages to be a worse watch than “The Amityville Asylum” (review here), though falls maybe a shade short of out-awfulling The Asylum’s “The Amityville Haunting” (review here).  Now pardon me as I put a hole in my head for being somehow compelled to seek out a copy of “Amityville Death House.”

NOTE: There is a very brief post-credits sting.

Review Score:  15

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