The.srt extension is the most commonly used subtitle format and when active, text will appear at the bottom of the screen warning the viewer of an impending. Please note the timings are synced for the blu-ray version of a film. Amityville: The Awakening (2017). The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (2013).
The Amityville Haunting | |
---|---|
Directed by | Geoff Meed |
Produced by | David Michael Latt |
Music by | David Raiklen |
Cinematography | Ben Demaree |
Edited by | Cody Peck |
Production company | |
Distributed by | The Asylum |
Release date | |
Running time | 86 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Amityville Haunting is a 2011 direct-to-videohorror film released on December 13, 2011. The film is inspired by the 1977 book The Amityville Horror. The film was produced by The Asylum and Taut Productions.
The film is directed by Geoff Meed and stars Tyler Shamy, Devin Clark, and Jon Kondelik, all of whom are uncredited. The tagline is 'The family did not survive. But the recordings did.' It claims to be based on 'actual found footage that documents the horrifying experiences of a family that moved into the infamous haunted house.' The film received negative reviews.
Plot[edit]
In June 2008, the Benson family moves into 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, due to issues with their teenage daughter, Lori. Despite the disturbing history of the house where Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family in 1974, the Bensons agree to purchase the house. Upon their decision, they walk outside to find their realtor dead in their driveway. The following day, Tyler Benson witnesses one of the movers falling down the stairs, which kills him instantly. The family continues to live in the house, despite the tension growing from the unexplainable events occurring.
From doors opening, to a mysterious phone appearing in the kitchen, paranormal phenomena continue to bother Tyler, while his parents refuse to believe that there is anything happening beyond their own explanation. Douglas Benson takes matters into his own hands when he decides to install CCTV cameras in the house. Young Melanie Benson attracts the attention of the family when she starts talking to her 'imaginary friend' John Matthew, which leads Douglas to wonder if Lori or Tyler told Melanie about the history of the house.
As the family grows more fearful of the unexplainable deaths of a close family friend and a neighbor boy who was attracted to Lori, Douglas starts to break down, using religious paraphernalia to rid the house of any spirits that reside within the house. After one month within the house, Lori, Virginia, Douglas and Tyler Benson all die in various manners. Melanie Benson is the only survivor, as she says that she has plans to stay in the house forever, along with John Matthew. The autopsy reports shown at the end of the film place emphasis on the fact that each victim was under extreme stress at the time of their death.
Cast[edit]
- Jason Williams as Douglas Benson
- Amy Van Horne as Virginia Benson
- Devin Clark as Tyler Benson
- Nadine Crocker as Lori Benson
- Gracie Largent as Melanie Benson
- Luke Barnett as Ronald DeFeo Jr. / The Ghost
- Tyler Shamy as Greg
- John Kondelik as Brett
- Alexander Rzechowicz as Donny Reddit
- Casey Campbell as Detective
Reception[edit]
The Amityville Haunting received negative reviews from critics. A Horrornews.net writer called it 'simply just a bad movie with no offering for viewers whatsoever', criticizing the over-used low-budget scare tricks and its false advertising as 'Actual found footage'. He also described Jason Williams' performance as Doug as 'not believable for what its trying to achieve and simply comes off as d*ck with an attitude', but said that 'The military freak-out tops the icing by just making it all seem rather silly'.[1]Dread Central's Foywonder scored it a one out of five, concluding his review with 'A part of me almost wonders if the only reason The Amityville Haunting even exists is because someone made a bet that they could dethrone Amityville 3D for the title of worst “Amityville” movie of all time. I don’t know if they succeeded here, but they sure give it a run for its money.'[2]
References[edit]
- ^'Film Review: The Amityville Haunting (2012)'. Horrornews.net. January 8, 2012. Retrieved November 20, 2014.
- ^Foywonder (December 30, 2011). 'Amityville Haunting, The (DVD)'. Dread Central. Retrieved November 20, 2014.
External links[edit]
- The Amityville Haunting on IMDb
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Amityville_Haunting&oldid=934537757'
(Redirected from Amityville (film series))
The Amityville haunting is a modern folk story based on the true crimes of Ronald DeFeo Jr. On November 13, 1974, DeFeo shot and killed six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, on the south shore of Long Island, New York. He was convicted of second-degree murder in November 1975. In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into the house. After 28 days, the Lutzes left the house, claiming to have been terrorized by paranormal phenomena while living there. These events served as the historical basis for Jay Anson's 1977 novel The Amityville Horror, which was followed by a number of sequels and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1979. Since then, many films have been produced that draw explicitly, to a greater or lesser extent, from these historical and literary sources. As Amityville is a real town and the stories of DeFeo and the Lutzes are historical, there can be no proprietary relationship to the underlying story elements associated with the Amityville haunting. As a result of this, there has been no restriction on the exploitation of the story by film producers, which is the reason that most of these films share no continuity, were produced by different companies, and tell widely varying stories.
The Amityville Horror, released in the summer of 1979, was a major box office success, and went on to become one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time.[1] A series of sequels would be released throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s through various distributors; some of the films received theatrical distribution, while others were direct-to-video releases. In 2005, a re-imagining of the first film was released.
Beginning in 2011, there was a resurgence of low-budgetdirect-to-video independent films based on or loosely inspired by the Amityville events.
In 2017, The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films distributed the first major theatrical Amityville film since the 2005 re-imagining. Amityville: The Awakening, which was filmed in 2014. It was released theatrically in Ukraine on July 27, 2017, and in the United States on October 28, 2017.[2]
- 1Films
- 1.1Overview
- 1.2Release
Films[edit]
Film | Release date | Type | Director | Writer | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
The Amityville Horror | July 27, 1979 | Theatrical | Stuart Rosenberg | Sandor Stern | |
Amityville II: The Possession | September 24, 1982 | Damiano Damiani | Tommy Lee Wallace Dardano Sacchetti (uncredited) | Mexican-American co-production film. | |
Amityville 3-D | November 18, 1983 | Theatrical, 3D | Richard Fleischer | William Wales | aka Amityville III: The Demon, American-Mexican co-production film. |
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes | May 12, 1989 | TV film | Sandor Stern | aka Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes or Amityville: The Evil Escapes | |
The Amityville Curse | May 7, 1990 | Direct-to-video | Tom Berry | Michael Krueger, Doug Olson, and Norvell Rose | Canadian production film. |
Amityville: It's About Time | July 16, 1992 | Tony Randel | Christopher DeFaria and Antonio Toro | aka Amityville 1992: It's About Time | |
Amityville: A New Generation | September 29, 1993 | John Murlowski | |||
Amityville Dollhouse | October 2, 1996 | Steve White | Joshua Michael Stern | ||
The Amityville Horror | April 14, 2005 | Theatrical | Andrew Douglas | Scott Kosar | |
The Amityville Haunting | December 13, 2011 | Direct-to-video | Geoff Meed | ||
The Amityville Asylum | June 3, 2013 | Andrew Jones | |||
Amityville Death House | February 24, 2015 | Mark Polonia | John Oak Dalton | ||
The Amityville Playhouse | April 13, 2015 | Limited theatrical release | John R. Walker | John R. Walker and Steve Hardy | aka The Amityville Theater |
Amityville: Vanishing Point | April 1, 2016 | Direct-to-video | Dylan Greenberg | Dylan Greenberg Selena Mars and Jurgen Azazel Munster | |
The Conjuring 2 | June 7, 2016 | Theatrical release | James Wan | Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes, James Wan and David Leslie Johnson | Part of The Conjuring franchise. The Amityville haunting is depicted in the first scenes, while the rest of the film deals with the Enfield case |
The Amityville Legacy | June 7, 2016 | Direct-to-video | Dustin Ferguson and Michael Johnson | ||
The Amityville Terror | August 2, 2016 | Michael Angelo | |||
Amityville: No Escape | August 5, 2016 | Henrique Couto | |||
Amityville: Evil Never Dies | June 2017 | Dustin Ferguson | Sequel to The Amityville Legacy | ||
Amityville Exorcism | January 3, 2017 | Mark Polonia | Billy D'Amato | ||
Amityville Prison | September 15, 2017 | Limited theatrical release | Brian Cavallaro | aka Against the Night | |
Amityville: The Awakening | October 28, 2017 | Franck Khalfoun | |||
Amityville: Mt. Misery Road | May 31, 2018 | Chuck Morrongiello and Karolina Morrongiello | Chuck Morrongiello | ||
The Amityville Murders | October 9, 2018 | Daniel Farrands |
Overview[edit]
The first film to be inspired by the story of the Amityville haunting, The Amityville Horror (1979) chronicles the events of Jay Anson's novel, in which the Lutz family finds their new home in Amityville, New York, to be haunted; the house had been the site of a mass murder by Ronald DeFeo Jr. in 1974. The following film in the series Amityville II: The Possession, is a prequel based on the book Murder in Amityville by Hans Holzer, and documents the purported supernatural events in the home that led DeFeo to murder his family. The third installment, Amityville 3-D is set after the events of the first film, and was released in 3D.[3]
In 1989, the fourth installment, Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, was released as a made-for-television film, and documents hauntings stemming from a floor lamp that was in the home at the time of the DeFeo murders. The Amityville Curse, released in 1990, follows a group of teenagers who spend the night in a former rectory in Amityville where a priest committed suicide; this installment was set entirely in a different house.[4]Amityville: It's About Time, released in 1992, focuses on a haunted clock that a family from Los Angeles, California takes into their home from an estate sale in New York.[3] The seventh film in the series, Amityville: A New Generation, also utilizes a haunted object as a main component of its storyline: It follows a man who purchases a mirror possessed by the spirit of his father, who also murdered his family in the Amityville house with a shotgun, not dissimilar to DeFeo.[3]Amityville Dollhouse (1996) follows a family haunted by spirits unleashed from a doll house replica of the Amityville home.
In 2005, a remake of the 1979 original film was released theatrically. In 2017’s Amityville: The Awakening, which received a limited theatrical release, a family with an ill son moves into the home and find themselves tormented by ghosts who seek to possess the son's body.
Further films would follow, each released direct-to-video or with limited theatrical releases: The Amityville Haunting (2011; an ancillary found footage film that presents supposed home movies that corroborate the family's haunting); The Amityville Asylum (2013; set in Amityville at a psychiatric hospital haunted by ghosts); Amityville Death House (2015; featured yet another explanation for the hauntings); Amityville Playhouse (2016; focuses on a haunted theater in Amityville); Amityville: Vanishing Point (2016; focused on a haunted boarding house in Amityville); The Amityville Legacy (2016; features a haunted toy monkey from the original house), The Amityville Terror (2016; a family moves to Amityville and are tormented both by an evil spirit and the townsfolk who want to keep them trapped there); Amityville: No Escape (2016; college students encounter evil in the forest around Amityville); and Amityville Exorcism (2017; evil spirits possess the daughter of a family that moves to Amityville).
Continuity between films[edit]
None of the films are direct sequels to each other, and parts I, II, and IV are the only films based on books from the Amityville book series and establish references with each other.[a]Amityville II is a prequel to the original 1979 film, which tells the story of the DeFeo family's mass murder (though they are named the Montelli family in the film). Amityville 3-D is a sequel to the first film based on the accounts of Stephen Kaplan (renamed John Baxter for the film) who was trying to prove that the Lutz family's story was a hoax. Due to legal disputes with the actual Lutz family the events of the first film could not be directly referenced, including the Lutz family themselves who were never referenced by name. The film, oddly, also refers to the murders that happened in Amityville II as the DeFeo murders despite the family having been renamed Montelli.
Of the later films, Amityville: The Awakening (2017) is explicitly a different continuity from all previous films, which are portrayed as existing in-universe: the characters watch and discuss the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, and a character brings DVDs of the sequels and remake to the protagonist's house.
The Amityville Murders (2018) serves as a loose prequel to the 1979 film and a retelling of the original DeFeo murders.
Release[edit]
Producers and distributors[edit]
The films have at various times been owned by several different production and distribution companies internationally and in the United States. American International Pictures produced and released the original film, before Orion Pictures bought the rights to the film, as well as II and 3-D. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) now owns films one through 3-D, and released them in a box set in 2005. While 4 was a TV film broadcast on NBC, it has been released multiple times by independent distribution companies in recent years (one of which was Vidmark, who also released Curse; Vidmark is now owned by Lionsgate). Multicom Entertainment Group owns distribution rights to Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, It's About Time ,A New Generation and Dollhouse.
Works cited[edit]
- Arkoff, Samuel Z.; Turbo, Richard (1992). Flying Through Hollywood By the Seat of My Pants. Birch Lane Press. ISBN978-1-559-72107-3.
- Smith, Gary A. (2009). The American International Pictures Video Guide. McFarland. ISBN978-0-786-43309-4.
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ^The Amityville Horror (1979) is based on the 1977 Jay Anson novel, while Amityville II: The Possession is based on Murder in Amityville by Hans Holzer. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes is also based on a novel by John G. Jones.[3]
References[edit]
- ^Miller, John M. 'The Amityville Horror'. Turner Classic Movies. In the Know. Retrieved 14 July 2017.
- ^Aronson, Alex. ''Amityville: The Awakening' Sees More Delays; The Internet Freaks Out'. Movie Pilot. Retrieved 6 August 2017.
- ^ abcdYoung, R.G., ed. (2000). The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film: Ali Baba to Zombies. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 17. ISBN978-1-557-83269-6.
- ^'Canuxploitation Review: The Amityville Curse'. Canuxploitation. Retrieved 19 July 2017.
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