Amityville 3-D:

• Director game
  • Stuart Rosenberg – Cool Hand Luke, The Pope of Greenwich Village
  • Damiano Damiani – Mafia, Angel With a Gun
  • Richard Fleischer – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Tora Tora Tora
• Unintentionally HILARIOUS tagline: Warning: In this movie, YOU are the victim.
• We could spend way too long talking about the trends this movie is a part of.
  • 1983 is the year before Ghostbusters, but something with parapsychology was happening in film. You have ghost science in this, The Enitity in 1982 and Poltergeist in ’82. That’s a pretty weird repeated theme between 82-84.
  • The 80’s 3D revival would only last a few years and was mostly relegated to incredibly bad third entries in horror franchises like Friday the 13th, Jaws and Amityville. It was also used in several zero-budget sci-fi flicks like Spacehunter and one of my personal favorite titles for a movie: Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.
  • Divorce seemed to be a big topic around this time, starting with 79’s Kramer Vs. Kramer, continuing through 1980’s How to Beat the High Cost of Living, 1982’s Shoot the Moon, and reaching out to the comedy Irreconcilable Differences in 1984 in which Drew Barrymore as a kid divorces her parents.
  • Slasher movies. No mystery here, these became all the rage after the success of Halloween and then the tag-along success of Friday the 13th.
• Movie was originally released as Amityville 3D due to legal reasons
  • Producer Dino DeLaurentis was sued by the Lutz family so “The Amityville Horror” and anything to do with the first two movies couldn’t really be rerferenced.
  • It was also released as Amityville: The Demon, which sort of makes it more in line with Amityville II: The Possession, but that’s because people were pissed when it came out on home video and wasn’t in 3D! Ha.
• Unlike the second movie, this one takes place after the original movie, making it a true sequel. The second movie is a prequel that goes over the top in dramatizing the events that led up to the infamous real-life murder of a family living in the house.
• The Plot
  • The story of Amityville 3-D, what little the is of one, concerns a journalist named John Baxter who investigates and uncovers a hoax happening at the Amityville house. As he is in the midst of a divorce, when he learns the owner of the place wants to sell cheap, he sees opportunity and snatches the place off the market, much to his colleague Melanie’s surprise.
  • Quicker than you can say “Get Out!” a disturbing number of flies are buzzing, water faucets are turning on by themselves and radiators are freezing over. But this movie isn’t content with scary happenings. Unlike the first movie, this flick was made during the slasher years, so instead of Michael Myers, Jason or Leatherface, you get… a house… that somehow… murders people.
  • First it’s the real estate agent selling the house. Then it tries to kill John himself while he’s in an elevator at work.
  • Apparently the flies can do weird out-of-house bidding.  
  • While in the house, Melanie is attacked by cold wind. Yes, cold wind. And then when she examines photos she took of the real estate agent, she uncovers demonic faces on a fly’s body. Rushing to tell John what she’s found, she is burnt to a crisp in an insane car accident.
  • John remains oblivious to all of these happenings until his daughter Susan dies in a boating accident behind the house while boating with some friends. His ex-wife Nancy was inside the house at the time of Susan’s death, and in the only interesting scene in the movie, Nancy sees her daughter walking up the stairs while soaking wet, never responding to her mother’s calls.
  • The discovery of her daughter’s death puts Nancy into a tailspin, so John decides the best thing to do is have a full-on paranormal intervention to debunk her delusion that she saw their daughter.
  • A scientist friend named Eliot comes in with tons of equipment and personnel and all Hell breaks lose when there’s a disturbance in the basement. Thinking he can free Susan’s soul from the house’s evil, Eliot goes to the well with John and Nancy. Is that Susan coming out of the well? NO! It’s the demon who breaths file and melts Eliot’s face!
  • Wind and fire fill the place with parapsychologists getting tossed around like there was a sale on stuntmen and then, for no reason, the whole damn house explodes. The end. I have no idea.
• The Cast
  • John Baxter, played by Tony Roberts. I’m pretty sure this guy, along with a few other allegedly cool actors like Elliot Gould and Richard Benjamin, are part of the DNA that gave us Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy. There’s just this weird air of decidedly uncool coolness wafting about Roberts in this movie. His whole life is falling apart, but he’s gonna look great in these chinos and blazer while drinking scotch.
  • Tess Harper, I was shocked to see her in this and even more shocked that this was at the beginning of her career. I could swear that she’d done a ton of stuff in the 70’s but nope, she’s four credits deep into her resume and already playing the “thankless wife” role. She’s awful here, just one-dimensional as all get-out. It’s painful to watch, but not really her fault.
  • Lori Loughlin, yes she of Full/Fuller House and that whole ugly Stanford University bribery/fraud business that landed her in jail, is in this as Susan. Man, she was adorable. But like everyone else in this thing, she has zero to do but look frightened and then, you know, DIES off camera in an accident that is never explained!
    • She sold her house for nearly 19 million dollars to the founder of Tinder in 202. True story.
  • Meg Ryan! But wow, I gotta say I was full on shocked to see Meg Ryan 100% fully evolved into the superstar she would be just a few years later. The charisma, quirkiness, lightness – it’s all there… as she’s recounting the real-life murders that happened in the house. What a breezy way to handle backstory! The first movie’s most tense and scary moments were showing the murders via flashback as the realtor is walking the Lutzes through the house. But here we get Meg Ryan grinning and flashing her baby blues!
    • I 100% thought Meg was also in Jaws 3D which was released the same year, but as it turns out that was Bess Armstrong.
• Fleischer was a workman director who had a TON of credits under his belt including some very, very big hits.
  • We’re talking about the director of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the original Doctor Doolittle, Fantastic Voyage, Tora Tora Tora and Soylent Green.
  • His post Amityville 3D career included Conan: The Destroyer and Red Sonja.
  • He was all over the place in his career. Every genre, every style of film!
  • He won a damn Oscar at the start of his career where, as a documentarian he earned the 1948 Academy Award for best documentary for a movie called Design for Death that was written by Theodor Geisel – you know, the author better known as Dr. Seuss!
  • Interestingly, not his first 3D rodeo – he did another one about 30 years earlier during the format’s heyday called Arena that was actually MGM’s first 3D movie!
  • Best scene in the movie, and proof Fleischer knew what he was doing, was the scene when Susan (played by Lori Loughlin) comes into the house while Nancy is visiting. There’s a lot of weird tension in the scene caused by the fact we just saw Susan outside unconscious and perhaps dying. Seeing her soaking wet and mostly unresponsive as she goes  up the stairs is chilling.
  • Also, the scene when Roberts’s character is dealing with the faucet spewing hot water has a cool wall-pushing-in effect that shows a command of the frame.
  • With the 3D in this movie, Fleisher struck me as an old guy who learned sex could be had with the lights on. He seems to be having a blast just tossing everything he can at the screen.  Indeed, the big draw here was the 3-D. And oh how he throws whatever he can at the camera.
  • Included in the shenanigans
    • Flies. So many flies.
    • A glowing “ghost ball”
    • A pole that shoots through the windshield of a car.
    • A ceiling fan blade.
    • Steam from a broken faucet.
    • A microphone.
    • A charred corpse that reaches for you.
    • A frisbee.
    • A flying mounted swordfish.
    • A well-dwelling fire-breathing demon.
    • It’s ridiculously clunky, and when you watch it without the 3D effect now, there’s a weird blurriness to everything. Not quite double-image, but also weirdly separated foreground and background focus, a product of the new-at-the-time Arrivision 3D process that was expected to be all the rage.
  • You cannot discuss this movie without talking about the opening credits with the slow dolly left viewing the house from the yard, and the random, same branch that keeps dipping down into the shot. No matter how far we move left, the branch comes back! And it’s accompanied by piano tinkles on the soundtrack.
• The Score:
  • Howard Blake tries on his best Lalo Schifren who did the amazing score for the original film.
  • This is a bonkers, jazzy, improvisational mess that reaches for what Schifren did, but cannot seem to find a central, memorable theme.
  • Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, he has a lot of credits as an arranger and composer for film, so I’m not terribly surprised by how derivative it is.
  • Meh, seems like he played second fiddle often, as he is credited for the orchestral score of Flash Gordon, when all anyone remembers is that Queen did the soundtrack!

Bottom Five Houses

5.) The Money Pit (1986) – Richard Benjamin

• Sinking all your money into a house, only to have every dream and penny be destroyed by insane bad luck? Yeah, this is a modern, way too real-life Hell
• This movie legitimately put the fear of God into me when it came to house ownership and sweat equity
• No thank you, I will always buy new construction. ALWAYS. Old bones? Fuck you.
• Shelly Long and Tom Hanks are a couple that buy their dream house which turns out to be nothing but a total disaster.
• Plumbing, electrical, gas, shoddy door-frames, broken stairs, raccoon infestation, everything. EVERYTHING goes wrong. This place is a total nightmare.
• Man, when the bathtub falls through the floor. Pure genius and a sure sign that Hanks was always a true screen star.
• Also, the scene with the electrical going nuts? When the tiles start popping might be one of the best jump scares ever. Horror or otherwise.

4.) Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) – George Lucas

• The Lars’s home on Tatooine.
• They had to create a place so barren and terrible that the hero of the movie would want to do just about ANYTHING to get out of there.
• Seriously, think about it. Luke hated this place so much he wanted TO GO TO BATTLE IN AN INTERSTELLAR WAR to get away.
• Living in what’s essentially an adobe on a desert planet in the armpit of the galaxy, this isn’t just a bad house, it’s a bad house on a horrible planet.
• It’s awful. It’s grimy and sandy and horrible. A moisture farm? You’re farming WATER to live. That’s what you do? Good lord.
• Just think, the best place to go on this planet is “A wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
• Imagine living in a place so shitty that your idea of fun is going to someplace called Toshi Station for power converters. Seriously?
• Jawas are high tide around here. It’s like living for the next visit of the Avon Lady.
• Amazingly, the entire fucking 9-movie Skywalker arc ends… here. With Rey deciding to live in this shithole because… she’s now a Skywalker. If she was really a Skywalker, she’d be living it up on Coruscant with a bunch of pleasure droids.

3.) Trainspotting (1996) – Danny Boyle

• Swanney or Mother Superior’s heroin den.
• Swanney is the oldest of a group of Scottish friends and drug-addicts and it’s in his place that their shit is cooked and shot-up. They call him Swanney, his name, or Mother Superior.
• While not everything awful that happens in Trainspotting happens in this terrible, decrepit, graffiti-ridden place, most of it does.
• The place itself is so stained, so gross. There’s water and shit stains everywhere, holes in the wall,a peeling ceiling, and a fucking terrifying looking carpet that you practically smell when you watch the movie.
• The pathetic scenes of the gang shooting up in this squalor are horrific.
• The death of the baby? Need I fucking even have to say more? How about them shooting up there right after?
• Sure, the cat-piss and -shit infested room that Tommy dies in is awful. Absolutely. But that’s Nagasaki to Hiroshima: just as terrible, but that first place of awfulness was first and made an unbelievable, lasting impression and the two sort of live together as one in a nightmare.
• Production designer Kave Quinn has gone on to do much more regal, elegant and decidedly British work in movies like 2012’s The Woman in Black, 2013’s Diana and 2020’s Emma, but honestly, her work on Trainspotting is so strong, so overwhelming, that these horrific rooms in which the characters lose themselves are characters themselves.

2.) Hausu (1977) – Nobuhiko Obayashi

• Many might now know this oddity from Japan, but wow, is it ever a trip that’s worth taking at least once.
• The movie is about a teenage girl named Gorgeous and her six school friends who travel to Gorgeous’s aunt’s house.
• Each of the girls is a clearly drawn archtype, you have Prof, who is smart, Mac who eats too much, Kung Fu that’s athletic –  you get the idea.
• Like Amityville 3D, the house itself is the killer – sort of. Without any real set-up strange things start happening and the girls start getting picked off one by one in very unique fashion by household furniture and items.
• A piano eats one girl, another is swallowed into a grandfather clock, another is killed by a mattress and another is eaten by a light fixture. Gorgeous herself is possessed by a mirror.
• Turns out the aunt has been dead a long while and her spirit consumes, through the house, girls who are not married because she herself never got to marry her fiancee who was at war when she died.
• This thing is wild. Part comedy, part whimsical dreamscape, part horror movie,  it barely hangs together as a movie and plays out as a full-on drug-induced series of bizarre vignettes.
• Apparently Obayashi was a pioneer director of commercials and experimental films who was pitched to make his first feature-length film after the success of Jaws.
• So he asked his young daughter for some ideas and it became a movie about a house that eats people.
• I love this flick. It’s so off-the-wall, filled with insane colors, tons of blue screen, freaky animated special effects, crazy cartoon-like violence, and a music score by Asei Kobayashi and  Mickie Yoshino that mashes together cat-on-a-piano horror themes, amusement park fanfares and Goblin-esque jamming.

1.) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – Tobe Hooper

• Is there a dirtier, nastier, grosser and more frightening house than the one Leatherface and family call home in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? No, I don’t think so.
• Whether it’s the animal bones hanging on the walls, the blood-stained meat-block in the kitchen, the horrifying metal door on gliders, or the lampshades made with human skin, the house in this movie is just as horrifying as its inhabitants.
• It’s a Hell where people are tortured, slaughtered and eaten. It’s a nightmare caught on film, that combined with the grating metal whines of the music score and the grungy cinematography go a long way to making you want to shower after watching the movie.
• Apparently filming in the house was just as horrible as it looks. Shot during a Texas summer, the crew splattered blood obtained from a nearby slaughterhouse all over the walls but then it was never cooled and there was very little ventilation.
• The inside temperatures allegedly reaches as high as 110 degrees, so add a sweating, filthy film crew, actors in make-up and dirty costumes the production couldn’t afford to clean and you must have had some next level stink.
• You can tell this was a terrible film shoot. You can see that these are largely new or non-actors and they all just seem scared and horrified by whatever the Hell was going on around them. I guarantee that house didn’t help any.
• Perhaps appropriately, director Tobe Hooper said that “everyone hated me by the end of the production” and also is quoted as saying, perhaps as a joke, “it just took years for them to kind of cool off.”
• The house was actually a Victorian-style “pattern book” construction from the early 1900s, meaning it was ordered from a catalog and assembled on property. It was moved to another town in Texas back in 1998 and all I have to say is WHY? Why in God’s Green Earth would ANYONE EVER want to live in this place.
• I don’t care that it was restored to its original grandeur! This is a big fat nope for me.

Staff Pick:

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

Mike’s next watch: The Happytime Murders

Puppets, muppets, marionettes, dummies. All the same to me. They’re puppets. And while it’s not a question that’s asked often, it’s a question that has been asked: What happens with puppets when no one is looking? Some express the wonder of imagination and think Pinnochio. Others go horror like that horrible 70’s movie Magic. And still others, like Peter Jackson when he did 1989’s Meet the Feebles, think puppets lead lives just like ours, filled with swearing, violence, drugs and sex. OK, maybe not like OURS, but you know, like ours if we were in a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino or Abel Ferrara. 

Interestingly, and perhaps perversely, the son of one of the greatest puppet creators ever – and the heir to the throne of the greatest puppet studio on the planet – had such thoughts. Brian Henson, son of the great, inspiring Jim Henson, in 2018 decided to go where Peter Jackson did nearly 30 years prior, by making an “adult” Muppet movie. Called “The Happytime Murders,” it was critically lambasted, nominated for six Razzies – including worst actress, worst director and worst picture – and scoring just a 23% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Some say the movie is funny and misunderstood. Most say it’s unwatchable drek. Well Mike, it’s up to you to settle this score once and for all. Is Brian Henson a creep or simply just a genius that most cannot understand?

Bottom Five Puppets, and yes, that also includes marionettes, dummies, or muppets. Pretty much anything on strings or with a hand up its ass.