Genre: Horror
Director: Sandor Stern
Starring: Patty Duke, Jayne Wyatt, Fredric Lehne
Rifftrax Year: 2021
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Short Featured: "Face It: It's Your Accident"
The Short
Our short starts off with the grumpy, tomato loving Mike having a bad day. He heads to work in a distracted mood and accidentally injures his hand. While bleeding out, he is lectured by a coworker he can't stand, Joe, about how he needs to take responsibility for his own actions and accept that he let the accident happen to himself. During his hospital stay in which he watches his daughter share her glistening, ripe tomatoes with his roommate a little too eagerly, Mike mulls it over and begins to wonder if Joe has a point.
This short is of course supposed to encourage safety in the workplace, championing the very real point that accidents can often be caused by one's own careless actions and one needs to recognize what those actions are. It's unfortunate that the short is as comical as it is though, which undercuts the serious message it's trying to deliver. The public shaming of Mike after his accident is really mean, as instead of taking him to a hospital they drag him into another room for him to stare directly into a mirror that says "Face It: It's YOUR Accident!"
The character preaching safety is intentionally grating, but that doesn't make it forgivable. Of course he's right, he's still a douche, as he goes directly to Mike's hospital room and scolds Mike in front of his family without even saying hello to any of them. The entire presentation of the moral is strange and it even makes myself want to get into an accident to spite this short. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go shake hands with danger.
The Movie
Full disclosure, the only Amityville Horror film I've seen is the Ryan Reynolds remake, and I remember not caring for it. I have thought about dabbing in the original Amityville movies but have been warded off because the word on the street is they are boring, even the original. How a movie can be boring and spawn that many sequels, I'm not sure. But never underestimate the power of a horror movie that uses the often misleading tagline "Based on a true story." The Amityville Horror was based on a novel, to be sure, but that novel (perhaps loosely) was influenced by events that actually occurred. The Amityville story was even briefly covered by Ed and Lorraine Warren, the two paranormal specialists/grifters (whichever you believe) that inspired the Conjuring series.
This fourth entry of the franchise was made directly for television, and also one of the few films of the Amityville series to be based on a novel from the actual book series that the original novel spawned. Of course this particular novel had no basis in true events (one could argue neither was the original novel, but that's neither here nor there). I can't say how faithful it is to the novel it's based, because that would presume I was bored enough to read it, but look at a wiki page makes it seem as if both stories of the book and film are vaguely similar. The Evil Escapes chronicles the idea that haunted household items from the Amityville home were sold at a yard sale, setting up hauntings distant from the house. In this film version, it appears whatever the fuck was haunting the Amityville house (which appears to be a demon in Klingon makeup doing scowling faces) decided the conduit of pure evil needs to inhabit is one hell of an ass-ugly lamp. Said lamp is sold and sent to a home in California, where it begins haunting the family that resides.
Because I have no basis for comparison between this movie and the ones that came before it, I can only comment on the movie in front of me, which is hilariously inept. Let's face it, made for television horror isn't exactly a rich environment. For every Trilogy of Terror or Don't Be Afraid of the Dark there was a When a Stranger Calls Back or The Birds II: Land's End. While it would be easy to point to budget limitations as a reason for a TV movie's weakness, what's ironic is that a lot of the best horror movies embrace a slight budget and use it to fuel their off the cuff creativity. Horror movies have been better than Amityville 4 with half the budget and have accomplished much more. In the case of this movie, it's fairly clear that there is effort to make the movie seem frightening, but little knowledge in what makes something effectively scary. A lot of the sequences in the film are a exaggerated to the point where the movie is almost a live-action cartoon. The evil entity of the film travels through electric cords via a comedic looking bubble, like something you'd see in a Three Stooges short if Larry were filling up electric wiring with water.
The acting does little to elevate. Patty Duke and Jayne Wyatt are seasoned veterans in the acting game, but they both look a little deflated here, and aren't really trying to elevate their material. But why would they? It's clear it wouldn't make a difference, and this film sure isn't worth the effort. Nobody else is either, as what remains of the regular cast are child actors who seem to be hired because they fill a specific "look" rather than their acting abilities. The daughter is a typical twenty-something pretending to be a teenager, though her bosom is so abnormally large for her slender frame that she can't so much as stand up without looking like she's aiming to fall over. Often I was feeling sorry as I pictured some producer forcing this actress to keep jutting out her boobs toward the camera until I realized she wasn't and she was only standing up straight. The son feels like he was cast based on what the producers thought "80's cool" was, with a kid mullet and bright clothing, but he often looks like Gary Busey's head shoved onto Tom Holland's body. The youngest is the attempt at an Omen style "creepy kid," who more or less just comes off as a brat rather than evil incarnate.
All of these strange choices in casting and creativity just kind of snowball and make the movie this weird and kind of funny little goofball that's not quite a trainwreck because it's too amusing to be one. I mean, it's a movie where most of the horror scenes are the actors screaming at a lamp, for god's sake. If the other Amityville movies are this silly, then maybe I'm missing out.
The Live Show
Now this is more like it!
I always get more excited about a Rifftrax event if it's a movie I haven't seen before, and Amityville is certainly the Halloween treat I didn't know I wanted. It's a ghost house movie that was never meant to be seen on the big screen here on the big screen anyway, and Mike, Kevin, and Bill are ready to hold our hands through it as they knowingly wink at us with a tone of "Get a load of this crap!" The tone of this Live show is perfection for the spooky season!
Our riffers themselves are very amused by the idea of a movie that focuses on a scary lamp. Their obsession with haunted décor is infectious, as they play with the evils of yard sales, shipping to other states, and moving it from one room to another. But the kooky style of the film is hard to not play with, as it's both silly slapstick and surprisingly gory. Hands get chopped off in garbage disposals, people die of infections, someone even gets drowned in sewage (think Zack and Miri in regards to this scene), and the shifting tone allows Mike, Kevin, and Bill something unique and new to latch onto after each turn, even as it's taking a break for some soap opera melodramatics. They note about how the haunted house is infested with bugs ("The movie's already attracting flies. That's a bad sign.") and later wonder if anybody got that dead plumber out from underneath the house, because he's never mentioned again after choking on poo.
All of this leads up to a riot of a scene where an exorcism is performed on a lamp, which is exactly as fun as it sounds. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe!
"Mirror mirror on the wall, show me how my hand got mauled."
Reeling back to the show's beginning is a rousing short which actually feels like it matches the tone of the film. After all, both the short and the feature feature mutilated hands. Face It: It's Your Accident is a wild affair of blame game, and it's pretty funny on its own. After all, right after our main character has his hand mangled, his coworker doesn't go get help, he drags him into another room so he can look into the "accident mirror," which is so funny by itself that it doesn't even need commentary. The short is full of strange quirks, including a daughter who is obsessed with feeding tomatoes to everyone (fondle her tomatoes, why don't ya) and a dad who openly licks frosting off the tomatoes on camera. Showcases like these are easy to make winning material out of.
The one missed opportunity that I can count with this short is that there is a sequence late in it where one character gets irritated at another and tries to run them over with a forklift. This would have been a perfect opportunity to do a callback to Fugitive Alien's "He triiiiiiiiiiiied to kill me with a forklift!" song, but no reference is ever made. I suppose it's asking too much for the MST alumni to remember every riff they've ever made for over thirty years (Bill wasn't even a part of the show when Fugitive Alien was on), but the reference would have made my night.
That minor imperfection out of the way, Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes is an absolute trophy of a Live show and one of their best Live performances to date. Maybe the extra year they got in preparation helped put some polish on this one, I'm not sure, but all I know is that I laughed, I cried, I may even have peed a little. This is the best Rifftrax Live in years and will likely go down as an all-time favorite.
Classic
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