Amityville Theater is the second film in recent memory looking to profit off of the Amityville name. It of course, has nothing to do with the famed events that took place in Amityville, New York, or the media based on those events. It does take place in a town called Amityville, where Fawn (Monele LeStrat) has inherited a theater that she didn’t know her parents owned. She takes a group of her friends there to spend the weekend and check the place out. Once there, they become trapped inside, and are soon beset by all manner of supernatural threats.
Also stretching out the runtime are these episodes concerning a teacher of Fawn’s, who has promised to look into the history of the theater. This is a bizarre piece of storytelling. The film actively moves away from the imminent danger inside the theater to occasionally check on the progress of a man’s research. We check in on the professor as he goes about the exciting business of getting a room at a motel and finding books at the library. In an even more bizarre bit of narrative business, the film also involves flashbacks of his past in England, which is mostly a conversation in a pub.
The addition of these episodes makes the film much longer than any one of these terrible direct-to-video horror movies tend or ought to be. And all it does is reveal information that should be inherent to the action. There is absolutely no reason that this history couldn’t somehow be revealed inside the theater itself. The film’s extraneous research episodes make the clunky, contrived devices of finding a journal or a record book at a location seem positively elegant in comparison. And when all is revealed, none of it even makes any sense.
And I don’t want to give the impression that it is these extra episodes that make this film bad. That’s just the special sauce. Even if you stripped that all out and somehow integrated all the necessary exposition in the main action, it would still be bad. The characters are all poorly written, and the story, even without all the distractions, moves at a glacial pace. There’s just no tension to be found anywhere in this story. At one point, apparently desperate for any sort of forward movement, the film suddenly introduces a Ouija board. The film is so bad at introducing its supernatural elements that it had to bring in an external device just to get its characters to interact with the uncanny.
This all adds up to the film that is actively resistant to being scary. There is just nothing in here that will elicit any screams, or even a mild yelp of surprise. There is a clear lack of skill in staging any of the scares. But honestly, even if the film were technically proficient in this regard, it would still be difficult to feel anything since the characters aren’t worth caring about. The dialogue is so wooden we might as well be listening to trees. And trees would be an improvement over this cast of actors, who are uniformly terrible.
I hope nobody gets drawn into Amityville Theater based on familiarity with the Amityville name. This is a miserable little picture that is basically stealing its identity. It so lacking in skill and proficiency that it’s a wonder it was made at all. And given that, it’s a bigger wonder why anyone would want this film to be screened. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that this film is really, really terrible. No one should go out and see it.
My Rating:
