Mentally ill from Amityville: A devil-shaped hole

AMITYVILLE 3-D

1983

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Written by David Ambrose

Spoilers: moderate

As that great if ephemeral title convention—coined by Jaws 3-D a few months earlier in 1983—does a little bit more than only suggest, Amityville 3-D was part of the 1980s' revival of 3-D films, and it wound up one of most integral parts of its legacy.  (Name three 80s 3-D releases without naming Amityville 3-D; I could, when I wrote this and had looked it up thirty seconds earlier, but I'm not sure I could now.  In fairness, that whole "third films in 3-D" thing does stick right to the brain, whether you'd like it to or not.)  Being integral doesn't mean it, or the format, was a success, and it was on the way out by the time Amityville 3-D even screened.  It certainly doesn't seem to have secured it any greater proportion of the box office when it did, and maybe even had the opposite effect (it made less than Amityville II: The Possession had the year before, and, even more dispositively, it was the last Amityville to be theatrically-released until the original Amityville Horror's remake, all the way out in 2003, despite something like a half-dozen "Amityville" films that still got made in-between).

If you'll allow me to whine for a second: I don't care if it didn't make money and was stupid anyway, I really, really wanted to watch it in 3-D, even if it wouldn't be the same 3-D that horror fans got in 1983 (it was always polarized 3-D in theaters, even then).  I'd seized such an opportunity with Friday the 13th Part III (which didn't come out in time to be a Part 3-D), thanks to its blu-ray's access to an old-timey anaglyph 3-D presentation, and the novelty helped me appreciate that film in a new way.  But there is not, at least not ouside of a European DVD release, a similar physical media option for the third Amityville (there's a 3-D blu-ray in the Scream! Factory set, which would not ordinarily be the same thing, even if I could talk myself into such a profligate purchase).  So I was a little sad, but I consoled myself with the recollection that at least my Jaws 3-D's blu-ray had an anaglyph 3-D version on it, so I popped that in, ready to don my red-and-cyan glasses and guess what?  That one's a "proper" 3-D blu-ray too.  At this point I spent a few minutes being a little depressed at the thought that even a suboptimal simulation of these experiences has been locked away from me behind a barrier of time, for all intents and purposes lost, forever.

Oh well.  I expect alone amongst its whole wave, Amityville 3-D had the distinction, or whatever, of being directed by a filmmaker whose career reached far enough back that he'd been able to contribute to the original 3-D fad, back in the early 50s.  This was Richard Fleischer, a frequent subject on this here blog and probably no other one, and I might as well admit the fact that Fleischer directed the third Amityville is probably the single biggest reason I decided that this Halloween I was going to review the thing that Scream! Factory, at least, and not without justification (just not very much), has dubbed "the Amityville Trilogy."  This third Amityville saw Fleischer revive his ancient association with Dino De Laurentiis, though I can't tell you exactly why or how: Fleischer's 1993 autobiography is obnoxiously blank when it comes to his late career, but DDL produced the last four features of that career.  As for "why" to this movie particularly, Fleischer wasn't even a horror guy, exactly, his forays into territory adjacent to the genre being better-understood as "thrillers," but there's still not too much daylight between "horror" and The Boston Strangler or Wait Until Dark knock-off See No Evil, and as far as that late career went, the most effective parts of the subsequent Conan the Destroyer, by far, are in supernatural horror.  Considering that once he'd matured as a director (and found widescreen formats in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*), I had never seen even one actually-bad Fleischer film, and that, at least by my lights, that selfsame facility with widescreen composition had made him a great director of the "suspense in rooms" variety, there was reason to be terribly optimistic about what Fleischer would cook up with a haunted house.

On the other hand, the 3-D movie from the original fad that Fleischer directed was 1953's Arena, and let's not hold it against Amityville 3-D that it is plausibly and even probably the worst movie of his entire career, and, specifically, comes off perplexed by and indifferent to being in 3-D in the first place.  Twenty-nine years later, Fleischer had at least figured out what 3-D was for, as is demonstrated in the first image of the film, adopting the franchise's now-traditional recourse to some manner of spooky establishing shot of 112 Ocean Ave, Amityville, NY (or rather, 18 Brooks Rd, Toms River, NJ), except now it's "spooky" by way of being a little goofy—if you didn't get a thrill from the production assistant wiggling the tree branch at the camera the first time, Fleischer will have him do it a second—something the movie pretty much avows when the pan across the property's boundaries takes in the usual FOR SALE sign rattling in the wind (machine) and we hopefully notice that instead of the usual "555," the prefix of the realtor's phone number is 666.  The rest of the movie isn't this cheerily idiotic, but I appreciated that it's happy to allow cheery idiocy as your possible response.

If that William Castley gesture didn't tell you, then our arrival within the house should (the interior has been redesigned a second time, this time to look more antique), that this is one heck of an old-fashioned movie.  It's almost a throwback—which is, at a minimum, an interesting swerve after the pretty arch-80s approach to a 70s story in The Possession—and this first scene makes that very clear when we take our seat in nothing short of a seance circle, right out of a movie decades older than this one is, alongside John Baxter (Tony Roberts) and his "wife" Melanie (Candy Clark), who have sought a medium to tell them of their late "son."  We get one of those tense, interestingly-balanced Fleischer shots, a two-shot of our leads in perpendicular colloquy (I believe also in split-diopter), and the optically-printed ectoplasm isn't far behind, but that gets blotted out by a flashbulb that illuminates the guy in a black stagehand bodystocking in staccato blasts of light.  For this is actually a sting—John is a reporter and Melanie a photographer for Reveal, a popular mag devoted to dunking on frauds and dipshits—and they and their ally, parapsychologist Dr. Eliot West (Robert Joy), smugly refer the phony Spiritualists to the D.A. for some "legal advice."  Meanwhile, Sanders, the owner of 112 Ocean (John Harkins), protests his own innocence in the matter, and John is willing to drop it, coincidentally alongside the owner mentioning how cheaply he'd sell this cursed house, something screenwriter David Ambrose (working under "William Wellman" though this is probably the most embarrassing part of the screenplay, and isn't that bad) doesn't seem to have perceived as a bribe.

John moves in, in part just to prove to everybody what an awesome rationalist he is and how ignorant they are for even being worried about the huge bottomless pit in his new house's basement (which, not to contradict myself re: the embarrassment its makers should feel, truly does come off like Ambrose, and Fleischer too, must have had the previous Amityville movies relayed to them secondhand, or that this didn't even start as an Amityville movie—not that that would ever happen).  This personality could, I suppose, suggest why he might've found himself in the middle of a divorce from his wife Nancy (Tess Harper), though his daughter Susan (Lori Loughlin) has no objection to spending time in the house that (not that this is explicitly invoked, but is of course implied) killed the DeFeos, and almost killed the Lutzes right after them.  Since this is what it is, John's obviously wrong—Sanders is slain by the demon, buzzing fly-style in homage to the first film's first demonic apparition, before John even has moved in.  Melanie is attacked soon thereafter.  And the entity's set its sights on Susan next, with John and Nancy in the bargain, because, after all, what the entity seems to crave most, and it's the tightest continuity between the three films, is swallowing entire families whole.

So Amityville 3-D's ultimately not as good as it probably should be, and Fleischer and Ambrose aren't fighting back the way Damiano Damiani did in The Possession from keeping this Amityville from lurching from scare scene to scare scene, but they do a much better job with barely-better elements than Stuart Rosenberg did with the lumpy first film.  Fleischer, for his part, is doing tone pretty well: the movie is sometimes as dumb and illogical as the first and, on top of that, it's clearly got something of a tongue-in-cheek attitude about all this; the film basically prompts a head-to-head comparison between Amityville 3-D and The Amityville Horror by more-or-less repeating the first movie's most pointless and (arguably) stupidest single scene, having the demon somehow attach itself to one semi-arbitrary person who's been in the house and then, very specifically, demonically interrupt their commute with a car accident—and nevertheless kind of making that work this time, partly because this time a demon already demonstrating this level of potency does in fact just murder its victim now that it's done playing with them, and partly because the scene is a pip in its own right, deploying the 3-D ready visual of improperly-stored metal pipes on the back of a truck for its near-miss of a physically-credible death, and then getting the movie's most complete gore out of the deal with some supernatural fire anyway, while further exploiting the 3-D gimmickry to imply that the skinless corpse maybe survived just long enough to be in hellish agony as it lunges at the camera, which is just some nice shock (and schlock) horror.

It doesn't hurt that this still feels like an escalation, and an escalation specifically against our protagonists, rather than a pointless sideshow used to derail an already-pointless priestly B-plot.**  (Indeed, I was prepared to try to figure out how the Exorcist-influenced, previously-very-Catholic Amityville movies were intersecting with Fleischer's nonobservant Judaism—his only "religious" movie, I believe, was the almost anti-Bible movie he made for DDL, Barbabbas—but Amityville 3-D just drops that, which I'm fine with, or rather replaces it with parapsychology, which is a neat approach and justifies Dr. West's cool, very-Fleischeresque super-science facility, an awfully fun set wherein some other supernatural horror movie always seems to be playing out in the—Panavision ratioed, I think!—window in the back of his office, eventually providing the most ridiculously goofball jump scare, that has nothing to do with anything, and gets to be one of the more likeable parts of the movie anyway.  To wedge it in somewhere, the Fleischerest of the sets we get here is the Reveal offices taking advantage of the vertical and diagonal lines of the giant printing facility it's looking out into, and which I presume it shares with several other publications given it's the size of a major city newspaper's factory.  To wedge this in somewhere, I might appreciate the softness of the photographic reproduction that the Panavision 3-D entails more than in Friday the 13th Part III or Jaws 3-D, which perhaps don't benefit quite to the same degree from the ethereality it affords.)

Now, I keep saying the movie's silly—and it will, depending on your sensibilities, get even sillier (look, there's a very dumb-looking Lovecraftian water monster to get to, and a full-tilt-but-not-as-good*** plagiarization of Poltergeist for our finale, not an ungratifying thing for a franchise that obviously paved Poltergeist's runway), though the optically-printed neon-blue cartoon demon fly that the effects team's already trotted out will arguably remain the film's undefeated silliness champion (and I will concede I don't like it)—but I also said Fleischer's doing tone well, not taking the vast majority of the movie seriously in a pretty obvious way, but pretending to take it seriously in a way that it still wants you to recognize, which is an aligned feeling, and often more productive in horror than wall-to-wall dourness would be, especially because it does leave you open to being caught flatfooted when it swings into seriousness anyway.  Like The Possession, there's a bit of a structural trick that Ambrose has built into his script—and because this is the Amityville that's reached escape velocity from the "true" story basis of the first two, I won't spoil what that structural trick is—but it is capable of being taken seriously and it does, mostly, work.

To some degree, it's going to turn out the movie's been a character study, or at least a study of an attitude, and it's not at all terrible at slowly building the groundwork for the kind of human story it has not obviously been out to tell.  The main thing is a mostly-likeable cast, including an unexpected ringer in the form of no less an ascending talent than Meg Ryan as Susan's friend Lisa, who brings a relaxed, louche confidence to her irresponsible teen thrillseeker that makes the detours into Susan's accidental summoning of the demon, not that it's remotely clear whether that matters, pop with personality (and, insofar as Loughlin is only resolutely fine, has the odd effect of serving as an incredibly clear premonition of these young supporting actors' future career arcs).  But I especially mean Roberts, whose materialist armor has to be shaved off layer by layer—it takes three deaths!—and I sometimes wonder if we're too poisoned by genre-savviness not to take issue with a horror movie where the characters don't know they're in a horror movie, because, you know, I probably wouldn't think it was demons if three people close to me died, either; the flavor of the character, of course, is that the third Amityville movie presents as its tragic hero much the same kind of judgmental dickhead whose hostility to superstition in general, and specifically the Lutzes' total fucking bullshit ghost story, has sometimes managed to overshadow his reviews of the first two Amityville movies.  This is all kind of great, with the unfortunately very major caveat of Harper, whom Fleischer is just screwing over—this is patently more a matter of direction than the actor's own choices—with a trajectory that, upon Nancy's collision with the horror, sends her into insensate delusion that Ambrose's script doesn't ever let her crawl back out of so she can be a character again, meaning she spends the whole last third of a movie she's become the deuteragonist of, and perhaps the more important of the pair, in a state of dissociated tediousness, right up until the climax.  It sounds minor, but this misstep hurts Amityville 3-D a lot, and in the end it (and, let's be real, some visual effects so substandard they're slightly confusing) means I have to measure my praise for the film to the point that the score I feel obligated to give it doesn't entirely reflect how much fun I had with it.

Score: 6/10

*It's worth asking aloud if there's something about 80s 3-D that made Panavision requisite; Friday the 13th Part III and Amityville 3-D both represent aspect ratio switches for their respective franchises, and Spacehunter: Adventures In the Forbidden Zone's 2-D version wasn't shot in Panavision while its 3-D version was.

**There's also an entirely meaningless elevator attack on John.  So what.

**But a much higher body count!  That parapsychology department gets fucking obliterated, man.