5.2 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 1.5 | |
Overall | 1.8 |
John Baxter, an investigator of psychic frauds for Reveal magazine, unmasks a fake medium racket operating in the Amityville house. Baxter buys the house, skeptical of its history, but finds it difficult to explain a series of supernatural events.
Starring: Tony Roberts (I), Tess Harper, Robert Joy, Candy Clark, John Beal (I)Horror | 100% |
Thriller | 22% |
Supernatural | 18% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 MVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Blu-ray 3D
Region A (locked)
Movie | 0.5 | |
Video | 1.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
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.
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.
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 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.
1982
Limited Edition
1979
Collector's Edition
1986
2015
1982
2018
2015
Haunted
2014
Quella villa accanto al cimitero
1981
1981
2013
2010
2011
2019
2013
1973
1986
2015
Extended Cut
2015
2009