The Amityville Curse (1990)

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

When I decided to binge watch the Amityville films I hadn't seen before I feared the worst. Partially because they've hardly impressed me and partially because the IMDb ratings for them were really poor.Starring Kim Coates this one screams milking the franchise, it doesn't look or feel like an Amityville film in fact I think it's barely even acknowledged twice maybe three times throughout.Random visions, a person possessed and a whole lot of nothing is what you can expect from these 90 minutes of sheer unadulterated boredom.Terrible flawed storyline, lackluster performances and very little to draw your attention for a moment let alone maintain it.The Good: Nope The Bad: The psycho music, really!? Unforgivably boringWas that even the Amityville house?Things I Learnt From This Movie: I learnt that this Amityville binge might have been a bad move

This is a great horror film it has a great story line. It also has great acting. It also great special effects. The first 4 Amityville movie are very scary. This is the fifth one and it is better. I do not know why the got a 2.8. That is underrating it. I give 10 out of 10. It is a great horror film. Amityville dollhouse is better. But still this is a very scary movie. See it. It is one of the scariest movies from 1990. If you do not get scared then no movie will scary you. This is one of the scariest movie of all time. It is a must see. It is very scary. I need more lines and I am running out of things to say. Great movie great movie great movie. See it.

This straight-to-video effort has somewhat of a terrible reputation, especially compared to the rest of the series. I haven't seen any of the other films to follow it, but the ones before; the theatrical releases (1, 2 & 3) and straight-to-TV (4) production were much better for entertainment. Were as the previous entry "The Evil Escapes" didn't feature the haunted house; "The Amityville Curse" goes go back to the earlier films formula, although the house has taken on a different transformation and the visual impact of that is less imposing. But that wasn't the main issue. This goes to the storytelling (which this plot has nothing do with the actual Amityville curse), pacing and performances. Especially the acting. David Stain and Dawna Wightman simply aggravate as the obnoxious leads, one being pompous and the other simply whining. An unbearable combination. Helen Hughes gives the usual batty old lady shtick. Then there are static turns by Kim Coates and Cassandra Cava. Only Anthony Dean Rubes showed any sort of spark. Father Parcaecus is brutally murdered in his own confessional by a mysterious assailant. After the murder, the church is closed and the belongings along with the confessional are sealed in a small room in the basement of Parcaecus' house. Years have passed when Debbie and Marvin come across the vacant house and decide to purchase it for their investment club. They invite a couple of friends up to help renovate the old house, but this weekend turns out be a nightmare with a wave of supernatural events occurring. Bog-standard shenanigans (disappearing ghostly figures) populate mostly an uneventful and tedious haunted house story spending plenty of time on filler (house in need of repairs) and non-existent chills. The story is uninteresting, plods and the final revelation you can see coming miles away. The stale script is terrible. It throws many different and hysterical ideas about, but never convincingly gels them together and leaves things rather unfulfilled. Like Debbie's baffling connection to the house. Loose and lazy work with mystery plot ties. Technically speaking it's solid, but mechanically tired and flat in its execution. Not much in the way of bumps in the night. The "Curse" is a real snooze. "Things are usually cheap for a reason."

**SPOILERS** Another spin-off of the original 1979 movie "the Amityville Horror" which has really nothing to do with what made the house in Amityville famous, or infamous, in the first place! The 1974 murder of the family who resided there by their drugged up and satanically possessed son.In this film the movie has to do with the murder of a local priest,Jan Rubes,who had his brains blown out during confession by one of his church members! This all happened some 12 years earlier, in 1977, in the movie that we see in a long flashback. It's now 1989 and this group of friends, looking for a place to live in the country, from the big city end up spending the night at the dark and spooky house in Amityville.Warned by one of the local people the one-eyed Ms. Moriarty, Helen Hughes, that there's a curse on the house the people spending the night there laugh her off feeling that she's just an old eccentric looking for attention. It turns out that Mrs. Moriarty, whom we saw in the opening flashback sequence, is not as nutty as they think. She not only knows what the reason is for the priest's murder but who was the person who murdered him!The film slowly plays itself out in it going back to the murder of the priest whom we later find out was not as holy as he seemed to make himself out to be. it turned out that his alleged murderer, Ted A. Bohus, hung himself in police custody before he could make a confession to the priest's murder. The people staying in the house at first have no idea what the house, with all the books and movies written and released about it, represents: Death and Horror to those who dare to either buy or spend the night in it. It's only after the truth comes out, which takes almost the entire film, to what the reasons were behind the priests murder and who in fact murdered him that the proverbial sh*t really hits the fan! It's then that the past that was so conveniently hidden by the killer, and Mrs. Moriarty, comes to the surface like a sudden blast out of a volcano.Unlike the previous Amityville Horror movies this one has really nothing at all to do with the supernatural or the cursed house itself. There's a subplot in the film involving one of the persons staying at the house Debbie, Dawna Wightman, who seems to be possessed by the place but it's never fully explained why. If Debbie is so in tuned with the horror, by who the killer is, awaiting her and her friends she in fact was one the last persons to realize it. The obvious unseen killer, by his own actions, could have been spotted almost as soon as he came on the scene but it took a murderous attack on Debbie by him for her to realize just who he is! So much for Debbie's, together with the help of Mrs. Moriarty, extrasensory perception and psychic powers! One of the better Amityville Horror sequels even though it was more like a whodunit-like murder mystery then a supernatural horror movie.