Amityville Ripper starts with a news segment of people hating Amityville movies, the original house being burned down, an auction of items that were in the house, multiple UFO abductions, the Spider podcast, a commercial for Alien Mingle and another for Steve Martin's (not that one) Video Store. At some point, I was wondering if this was using Pond 5 footage like every other Amityville movie and just trying to pad a runtime with all of this footage, but then as the movie went on, surprise, this actually gets why I watch these movies.

Not just because a demon cursed me to watch all of them and would ruin our web traffic if I stopped.

This takes place in 2000 - the Y2K bug is a thing - and Marianne (Kelsey Ann Baker) and her brother - or step-brother - Nichols (Hunter Redfern) wake up to their parents going away on vacation for New Year's Eve. Marianne - known as M - had something big planned with her best friend Annie (Angel Nichole Bradford). And no, not lesbian stuff, as her brother and his wheelchair bound friend Chapman (Ryan Martel). Instead, she has had the knife of Jack the Ripper sent to her from that auction. And her friend Tony, who is now in Hollywood, said it's real because "he lived that Ripper lifestyle."

What is a Ripper lifestyle?

Also, Marianne has dreams of slow jams playing over stock footage of a jet ski, which makes her even more endearing to me and not just because she's a goth girl with shaved sides of her hair and looks a lot like Rainbow Harvest. She also mentions that she really wanted the clock from the house, but an architect - Jacob Sterling, right? - got it first.

While everyone - including way too nice cheerleader Liz (Anna Clary) - is partying and playing Sugar Ray, Marianne and Annie go up to her room and have a seance with a Ouija board, some tarot cards, Jack the Ripper's knife and plenty of candles. Also: If M is so goth, why is she wearing an N'Sync shirt when the rest of her room is full of Universal Monsters pillows, a black metal poster and a Killer Klowns poster? At least her closest is all full of black shirts.

Director and writer Bobby Canipe Jr. Has obliterated the fourth wall in this movie, as the characters even find the script, not that it keeps all of them alive. Just look at the dialogue:

Annie: Everything that happened in the Amityville house was true. And can you just imagine if this knife of Jack the Ripper's became imbued with the power of the Amityville house? It'd be like we had some sort of Amityville ripper on our hands.

Marianne: True, but I think that's kind of the point. I'm pretty sure that the name of this movie is Amityville Ripper.

Then The Ripper (Josh Allman) comes to life, wearing a Dracula costume, and also aliens.

There's a line that sums up this entire movie, as well as all Amityville sequels.

"Brother, it's an Amityville sequel. ***** different here."

Not all the humor hits perfectly, but who cares? This is way better than nearly any other Amityvlle sequel, which isn't saying much, but it does try. Which is, again, way more than almost every other sequel not made in Canada or by an Italian director.

Preparing for a special party, a woman and her friend decide to use the opportunity to covertly conduct a seance with Jack the Ripper through a knife of his acquired from the destroyed Amityville house, but when the actual killer crashes the party forces them to stop the deadly killer.

This was a fairly fun and enjoyable genre effort. One of the better aspects here is the decent enough setup that allows for a fun way to bring everything together with a solid series of storylines. The main setup about the party taking place and how everyone is clearly on opposite ends of everything, with the brother trying to find a person to hook up with, the cheerleader being way too enthusiastic about getting everything put together, and the goth girl trying to find the chance to get together with her friend and do their thing while the others are off doing their thing is a fun way to go about this kind of setup. With the way the fabled knife gets involved and the eventual release of the killer during the party, this is all worthwhile enough to tie together the various connections here which is what provides this one with a solid enough setup. The aftermath of the setup here is the main rampage where the combination of cheesy comedy and indie stalking offers some fun scenes. The sense of comedy here is rather fun, offering up a decent mixture of quips showing off their stupidity while also going for a stellar type of fourth-wall-breaking commentary that also includes input from the production team to help things along. As well, the stalking and slashing here is quite fun with the release of the killer in the middle of the party making everything into a solid series of ambushes with random partygoers which has the usual formula of approaching an unnamed extra and graphically killing them off in a silly enough sequence. Full of silly scenarios with some silly gore along the way, there are some rather fun positives to help this one along. There isn't much to dislike here but it does have some issues. The main drawback is the heavy use of dialogue present in the first half where it's far talkier than it needs to be for something of this length. Rather than go for the kind of expected premise involving the party taking place at the beginning of the film and featuring the killer going through the guests during the night, this takes quite a while before that point with the different storylines spelled out that there's the need to get the rampage off the way it does because it's wasted the time it did on these other factors. The other issue here is the obvious low-budget origins featured here, with the commentary on its budget not being the only factor here but the lack of action and overall presentation also giving off that particular impression which can all be enough to bring this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, and Brief Nudity.

Wow, within the first minute of the movie, you just know that you're in for 78 minutes of low budget trash. Yeah, the mvie was just screaming crappy production and low budget. Just take a look at the acting and the characters, and you will wholeheartedly agree.

Granted, I harbored zero expectations to the movie when I sat down to watch it, and with good cause, because writer and director Bobby Canipe Jr. Didn't deliver anything worthwhile or particularly entertaining. This was a low budget, amateurish attempt at a horror movie at best.

The movie is listed as a horror comedy, but there isn't much of either to be seen throughout the course of the 78 minutes that the movie ran for.

The acting performances in "Amityville Ripper" were questionable at best. Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list in this 2023 movie. Nor can I claim that I was particularly impressed with anything I witnessed on the screen from the cast members.

Seriously, there should be a law against random people spewing out movies and slabbing the "Amityville" name on it. But hey, despite knowing that the movies are 99% likely to be horrible, we still opt to sit down and give it a chance. And such was it also with "Amityville Ripper" from writer and director Bobby Canipe Jr. Suffice it to say that this wasn't one of those times where an "Amityville" movie proved good and entertaining.

Do yourself a favor and don't fall into this "Amityville" trap. Some of us suffered through it, so you don't have to. You're quite welcome.

My rating of writer and director Bobby Canipe Jr.'s 2023 movie "Amityville Ripper" lands on a two out of ten stars.