From among the Video Nasties In 1963, indie producer-director and godfather of gore and direct marketing Herschell Gordon Lewis made Blood Feast, a movie typically identified as the very first gore picture (that is, a movie with no intrinsic merits and no hook to its marketing campaign other than “there is blood, lots of it). […]

From among the Video Nasties I’m not sure whether what is most impressive about Night of the Bloody Apes is a positive (there’s so much wacky bullshit going on here that it saves the film from that meanest of fates, being boring) or a negative (it’s so boring that I lost interest halfway through even […]

A film called Amityville Exorcism was just about inevitable, and the only surprise is that it took until January 2017 for somebody to release it. Time alone will tell how long we have to wait for Amityville Halloween and The Amityville Chainsaw Massacre – the heaving glut of microbudget Amitvyilles has slowed down at the […]

So, at the start of Amityville: No Escape, this bullshit happens: And there’s a lot we could say about that, no doubt, but I’ll tell you what really gets to me: “inauspicious?” Yeah, I mean that’s one word for it. Assuming that the haunting is what ruins an otherwise elegant dinner party, or something. Point #2 […]

When one gets neck-deep in the muck of persistently godawful cinema – as one must certainly have done as a prerequisite for ever supposing that watching The Amityville Terror, from 2016, is a good idea – little things start to seem really important. Like you need to grab onto something, if this is going to […]

The stream of micro-budget pseudo-Amityville pictures became a raging river in 2016. This was, I assume, because smart rip-off artists figured that they’d be able to take advantage of Amityville: The Awakening, which was set to be released at two different occasions that year (and then bright and early in 2017), sadly forgetting the gypsy […]

One must be careful about using words like “nadir” to discuss a series when one has not seen all of the entries yet – especially when the series spent as much time in micro-budget direct-to-video hell as the loose-knit Amityville pictures have – but my God, if The Amityville Playhouse, AKA The Amityville Theater, isn’t […]

Not that The Amityville Asylum set out to prove that you can make a bunch of clichés seem marginally less tired if you blend them with a bunch of other clichés, but that’s kind of the net effect. The second in the suffocating wave of direct-to-video Amityville films that was inaugurated by The Amityville Haunting […]

We come now to one of the odder curlicues in the world of Amityvillania, a film that I wasn’t sure I was going to include in this retrospective until the moment before I hit “play”. I speak of My Amityville Horror, a 2012 documentary (and a little bit to my surprise, I don’t even feel […]

The recap first: before we can know where we are, we must be very certain to know where we’ve been. Now, the notion that there is a thing called the “Amityville series” is a tricky, difficult claim to defend on the merits, but it’s at least the case that there are certain behind-the-scenes maneuverings that […]

Once upon a time, Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Andrew Form co-founded a production company called Platinum Dunes, whose purpose was to remake old horror films, but shinier and worse. I mean, presumably the “worse” part wasn’t in the corporate statement of principles, and it just worked out that way. I think it’s entirely fair […]

I’m going to chalk it up to some movie-watching form of Stockholm syndrome, or maybe just having my quality needle wrenched out of alignment by the series, but Amityville: A New Generation, struck me as astonishingly close to not completely terrible. The 1993 film brings us to the end of the John G. Jones era […]