Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		1.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		1.5

Amityville 3-D Blu-ray Movie Review

Three's the charmless.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 27, 2013

Note: This film is currently available only in this box set: The Amityville Horror Trilogy.

Does it ultimately even matter if 112 Ocean Avenue in the town of Amityville on Long Island was really haunted, as its residents, the Lutz Family, insisted? After all, doesn’t that oft-quoted adage go something like “perception is reality”? And for millions of readers who made The Amityville Horror a top bestseller in 1977 (and for decades afterward), while the book’s imprimatur that it was a “true story” may have helped to spark interest, it actually perhaps has less to do with the franchise’s success than might be initially assumed. In fact, one of the fascinating things that has sprung up in the wake of the book and the many films which followed (the first three of which are presented in this new box set from Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory imprint) is that once accusations of fraud and chicanery started arising, the whole Amityville phenomenon only seemed to gain momentum. The seventies were for whatever reason a heyday for books and movies about demonic possession, from the iconic heights of The Exorcist to still scary but perhaps somewhat lesser fare like The Omen and the vastly underrated The Possession of Joel Delaney, but there’s little doubt that these films are near the bottom rung (or perhaps even below the bottom rung) of this decade’s genre offerings. That doesn’t mean there aren’t scares here, for there certainly are, at least in fits and starts scattered throughout the three films, but cynics may have a hard time maintaining a straight face through some of the patently ridiculous plot machinations, poor writing and less than Oscar worthy performances this trio of would-be spook-taculars (sorry) have on tap.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first—well, you know the rest of that saying. Very soon after The Amityville Horror stormed the bestseller lists and then became one of the biggest box office hits in American International’s somewhat dubious history, people started coming out of the woodwork insisting that the entire thing was, to put it plainly, a deception. That very element is finally dealt with head on in Amityville 3-D, a pretty lame entry that nonetheless has some tangential interest in that it finally calls a spade a spade and features a main character who’s attempting to prove that the entire Amityville tale is nothing other than a charade. Of course, this being a lo- fi horror entry, that muckraker ends up finding out—after an interminably long interlude where he remains hilariously unconvinced by all manner of horrific events unfolding around him—that there is indeed a malevolent spirit at work in the so-called Amityville House.

Tony Roberts, miles (if not light years) away from his Woody Allen collaborations, plays journalist John Baxter, who is convinced that all the hoopla surrounding the Amityville tale is pure hokum. Along with his partner Melanie (Candy Clark), John is out to prove that there was never any paranormal phenomena associated with the house, and against Melanie’s inklings of disaster, John ends up buying the house. In the first of several increasingly hilarious examples of dunderheadedness, John isn’t the slightest bit concerned when he discovers the realtor who sold him the house dead in the attic of the place (we’ve already seen what happened to the hapless salesman in a scene which recalls a hammy Rod Steiger scene in the first Amityville film).

A number of troubling incidences continue to accrue, with John remaining absolutely clueless, even after one tragedy involving Melanie and then another tragedy involving his daughter Susan (Lori Loughlin) that sends his ex-wife Nancy (Tess Harper) into a near psychotic episode. (That’s a very young Meg Ryan playing Susan’s friend Lisa). This gets to the point that some viewers may be hoping that the damned demon does attack John personally, just so the idiot would wake up to the fact that all is not rosy in his little self-created skeptical world.

Amityville 3-D tries to whip up a few scares along the way, and if it succeeds (which is debatable), it’s due more to tired tropes like jump cuts and accompanying sound effects than it is to any inherent drama or spookiness. By the time the Amityville House self-destructs at the end (with, of course, a teaser to indicate a sequel could be in the works), even diehard fans of this franchise may be saying “good riddance”.

Amityville 3-D Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Woo—oo—ee. There may be ongoing controversy about whether or not the Amityville House was really haunted, but there are not going to be many questions about whether Amityville 3-D's MVC (3D) and AVC (2D) 1080p presentations in 2.35:1 have some kind of "ghost in the machine" effect going on. This is a pretty shoddy looking effort in either of its iterations, one hobbled not just by pretty prevalent softness (to the point that things look out of focus quite a bit of the time), but more so by a weird "fringing" anomaly that I thought might have to do with the polarization in the old stereoscopic 3D process, but which our resident technical guru Deciazulado considers to be a very bad case of lens chromatic aberration. What this boils down to is typically "lines" of either blue or red fringing various elements in the frame, usually straight (or nearly straight) lines like the trunks of trees or the sides of the shutters on the house's windows. It's just as prevalent in both the 2D and 3D versions of the film (you can see a pretty good example of it on the tenth screenshot accompanying this review, on the right side of the tree to the right side of the house). Both the ubiquitous softness and this odd chromatic anomaly may be inherent in the elements, but they are exacerbated by the increased resolution on the Blu-ray.

The 3D effects are occasionally effective, though they're also a bit headache inducing as older techniques tended to be. Fleischer likes to "poke" the audience with things like steel pipes crashing through windshields or gruesome ghouls popping out toward the viewer. There are subtler effects here, too, with objects placed in the foreground, but they simply don't have the sharpness and definition that younger viewers more used to Real 3D processes may expect, and in fact many of them appear slightly out of focus, as with large swaths of the rest of this presentation.

Amityville 3-D Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As with the other two films in this set, Amityville 3-D features lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.l and 2.0 mixes. This 5.1 mix is the least effective of the three, which is not say it's bad in any major way, simply that it doesn't have the attention to (repurposed) detail that the first two do. There are still discrete effects placed throughout the surrounds, but they simply don't have the presence that some may be hoping for. Howard Blake's score nicely fills the side and rear channels, and dialogue is always very cleanly presented and easy to understand. Fidelity is fine and dynamic range is very wide.

Amityville 3-D Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• A Chilly Reception: An Interview with Actress Candy Clark (1080p; 9:46). Clark is her typically charming self, talking about how her practical frame of mind means she's never had any paranormal phenomena invade her own life.


• Photo Gallery (1080p; 1:32) has some fun Italian posters for the film.


• Trailer (1080p; 00:39)

Amityville 3-D Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Amityville 3-D is easily the weakest of the first three Amityville films, one which has a reasonable premise—a skeptic attempting to debunk the stories of the hauntings—but which stumbles through its paces like someone drunk rather than possessed. There are a couple of creepy moments here, but they're far outweighed by a rampant silliness that most will find hard not to laugh at. The video presentation here is pretty problematic, though the audio is at least reasonably effective.