Amityville: The Evil Escapes
No dead horse has been beaten beyond the point of putrefaction quite like the Amityville franchise. There are as of this writing no less than ten sequels, which the Friday the 13th series could only accomplish by going to the hood, space, and Hell; and that the Witchcraft series could only accomplish by becoming porn. That’s not including the History channel documentaries that expose the true-story as a preposterous scam; you know your scam has been thoroughly debunked indeed if even the History channel won’t buy it. Without even any new additions, the sheer number and imposing sense of wasted time this series as accomplished is enough to drive you insane or, as was the fate of another of its stars – make you want to just snap your fingers and restart a better universe. The Evil Escapes, however, is perhaps the most entertaining of the bunch. Unlike the three previous movies, this one is a made-for-TV movie and has all the delights only a made-for-TV movie can get away with. A theatrical release must always deal with the unforgiving calculus of money spent vs. time wasted and not all movies survive to the end. With a TV movie, however, there’s always the chance than someone might think the movie is bad because of censorship; with a touch of bad sound design, you could get away with considerable bad dialogue if people think your cussy movie was simply mauled by the powers that be. You could even get away with teasing a naked woman you never intended on filming naked by making it seem as if you really wanted to fix the wage-gap and pay her more, but the Puritans at ABC would only let you get away with a seventy-five cent side-boob for every dollar you have to pay a man not to get naked. Not that there’s even any hints of nudity in this movie; it’s unlike Part II with Diane Franklin and Part 3 with both Lori Laughlin and Meg Ryan, which w/r/t full frontal both movies got correct by having nudity in one and not in the other. I suppose that worked out for Lori Laughlin in the long run, nudity having not prevented her career in Full House nor probably her career in the fuller house to come. Also unlike the first Amityvilles, most of the Evil Escapes occurs outside the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. In the beginning a pose of priests arrive at the original house, which I’m quite sure exploded in the previous movie and must have been rebuilt exactly as it was and again repossessed. One of the priests carries with him a large black duffel bag exactly like the sort action-movie heroes carry guns and magazines in, and he starts passing out crosses as if they were guns and magazines; this makes me wonder if crosses can run out of holiness the way guns run out of bullets. The parallels with action-movies don’t end there: the priests span out in a grid search, going from room to room and all but signaling each other with two-fingered Catholic sign language and shouting “Clear!” when there’s no demon in the room. I can imagine priceless POV shots filmed with the crosses acting as actual crosshairs. One of the priests goes into a room and is attacked by a flying chair. This startles him so badly that he repeatedly flings holy water out of his chalice while quickly mumbling prayers in literal rapid-fire spray-and-pray that doesn’t faze the chair even a little. In another departure, the demon in this movie is not a free-range demon but is now confined to a floor lamp even the character’s remark is unbearably ugly; I now understand why the Oxford English Dictionary lists a lamp as one of the definitions of “bitch”. The lamp-demon goes by the name of Cigna, a fact that has significance when you consider that a big portion of the cast in this movie are elderly women. I’m not sure what beef Cigna got into with the Amityville copyright holders in the late 80s, but the behavior of at least one of these characters can only be explained with prescription drug abuse. The youngest daughter in the unfortunate family misbehaves and sulks frequently; the movie wants me to believe she is under the demon’s influence, since she stares at the lamp longer than the woman the actress eventually became will ever stare at this movie. Not so; more likely she has found grandma’s pill jar and is alternately on a manic rampage one day or weathering catatonic malaise during withdrawal the next. The lamp was sold after the exorcism at a yard sale; a yard sale that was probably also real because there’s so much shit in the yard that a tracking shot of one of the actors is obscured with a pile of junk; I do not honestly know if the tracking shot was following the actor or giving a panorama of the merchandise because both have as little to do with the plot as the other. An elderly woman purchases the lamp after she cuts her finger on it; she will get Satanic tetanus from the cut and die in a hospital scene that is also oddly shot: her hospital room is filmed from inside the reception office next to it, which gives the temporary illusion that perhaps the actress really is sick and the film crew is social-distancing from whatever sick shit she has. The bulk of the movie revolves around a family who move in with their grandmother, whom the lamp was mailed to. Things begin to go wrong: a bird dies in a toaster oven without anyone questioning how it got in there or how it didn’t get out; a chainsaw becomes sentient in the hands of the boy and gently fucks nearly all the furniture in the basement; a repair man whom the oldest girl has a crush on loses his hand in the garbage disposal in a scene straight out of Wish Upon. His hand will reappear when a plumber tires to stop the flow of sewage throughout the house; it plops out of a pipe just before the plumber is smothered in putrescent black goo that looks exactly as what I suppose the Ghostbuster’s goo should have looked like after Dan Aykroyd Crystal-skull-fucked it. The goo contributes its small part to inarguably the funniest thing in the movie: while brushing her teeth, the oldest daughter turns to face the camera and shoves a goo-covered toothbrush in her mouth with an attitude before shouting an “I’m coming!” line that gives the goo hilarious suggestiveness no matter how scary the music-sting mistakenly thinks this is. The final confrontation with the lamp doesn’t leave much to be desired. After a priest chants at it and the youngest girl stabs him and the mother goes into hysterics, the grandmother loses patience and just throws the lamp out the window. No one dies but the plumber, who was never found and I suppose still rots there to this day. It’s a bad movie, undeniably so, but more enjoyable in its badness than an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark. If it had upped the gore and had self-awareness, it could have been as enjoyable as a bad Tales from the Crypt movie. It is infinitely more enjoyable, once the insanity cranks up, than a made-for-TV Amityville Horror movie ever had a right to be. It doesn’t catch lighting in a bottle, but at least it caught a lightning bug. |