The Amityville Curse ... oh boy, where to begin.

A priest is shot to death while in his confessional booth by an unknown assailant. That booth is then stored in the basement of his house for some reason. Flash forward 12 years later, we meet two couples (Marvin & Debbie, Frank & Abigail) and a single friend of theirs named Bill who all buy that house formerly owned by the murdered priest. They plan on fixing it up and renting it out I think (the movie never goes into details on that).

Our Amityville 5 heroine Debbie is someone who experiences premonitions in her day to day life, so as soon as she enters the house her senses are triggered by the evil surrounding her. She quickly freaks out at literally everything that happens in the house. We get black cats, a creepy basement, and a ghost hanging from a tree outside the house. None of which connects to anything or makes any kind of sense. Eventually we see an unknown assailant (the same person who killed the priest) knock off a few more people. This leads to the discovery of who that killer is and the knowledge that they are in fact possessed by the curse of Amityville. It comes down to seeing if Debbie will survive the final act against the killer, a final act that manages to be somewhat intense and well done.

The fact is this is an Amityville sequel by name only. It carries the series name, but does not have anything to do with the DeFeo's or Lutz's or even that Baxtor family from the 3-D sequel. It suffers with a bit of an identity crisis as well. It wants to be a haunted house Amityville sequel, but also plays the murder mystery of who killed the priest twelve years ago (by the way, it is extremely obvious who the killer is about 15 minutes in). The movie never takes a direction with a specific plot and sticks to it.

The acting was a particularly weak point. Most are relatively unknown Canadian actors who are clearly out of their element. Even Kim Coates (who I expect a bit more from) looked bored during 90% of his scenes. The characters also aren't fun or interesting at all, which made me feel absolutely nothing when most of them met their demise.

The Amityville Curse is a cheaply made horror movie about ghosts and a murder mystery, nothing to do with Amityville at all other than it is set on Long Island. The final 15 minutes is actually creepy and done well, but to get through over an hour of absolutely no scares and really bad dialogue and no story direction is NOT worth it.

Luckily, the series gets much better after this.

2/10

I usually reserve the month of October for scary or horror movies to celebrate Halloween, and I thought this movie might serve as a nice attention-grabbing creepy thriller. Under than a few mildly moments that jump at you, this movie is basically an all-talk flick with no suspense, a weak plot, bad dialog, and horrible acting.

From IMDB's summary, five people spend the night in an abandoned house dubbed the Amityville house, but it has nothing to do with the infamous Amityville horror house or story. The people find themselves terrorized by ghosts (which hardly shows up in the film), venomous insects (which is just one single spider that crept up on a couple of people), and apparitions (which hardly shows up).

The Debbie character played by Dawna Wightman can't act to save her life. She over-exerts herself during distress or emotional scenes. The Marvin character played by David Stein tries to act professional or dramatic, but fails miserably. And, the Abigail character played by Cassandra Gava tries to be the sexy one, and tries to be the one with reason, but the acting just isn't up to par.

Go ahead and pass on this one for a Halloween scare.

Grade D---