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AMITYVILLE 1992: IT’S ABOUT TIME
Rating:  ½
USA. 1992.
Director – Tony Randel, Screenplay – Christopher DeFaria & Antonio Toro, Inspired by the Novel Amityville: The Evil Escapes by John G. Jones, Producer – DeFaria, Photography – Christopher Taylor, Music – Daniel Licht, Visual Effects – VCE (Supervisor – Peter Kuran), Makeup Effects – Kurtzman, Nicotero, Berger EFX Group, Production Design – Kim Hix. Production Company – VPS/Republic Pictures.
Cast:
Shawn Weatherly (Andrea Livingstone), Stephen Macht (Jacob Sterling), Damon Martin (Rusty Sterling), Megan Ward (Lisa Sterling), Jonathan Penner (Dr Leonard Stafford), Nita Talbot (Iris Wheeler), Dean Cochran (Andy)
Plot: Architect Jake Sterling returns home to L.A. from New York, bringing back an antique clock he found while demolishing houses at Amityville. Soon bizarre happenings begin to occur. Jake’s son Rusty is suspected by police for killing neighbourhood dogs are killed and setting hedges on fire. Meanwhile Jake’s teenage daughter Lisa starts going out dressed to kill. A neighbourhood occult expert identifies the clock as once having belonged to the Satanist Gilles de Rais. As Jake succumbs to obsessive behaviour, his housekeeper and live-in lover Andrea Livingstone try to fight the clock’s influence.
This was about the fifth film to have been spun out of the whole Amityville hoax. (See below for other titles). By now the connections to the original false claims made by the Lutz family about having lived in a real-life haunted house had run fairly thin and this film doesn’t bother to even set itself in the haunted house or in Amityville (or even New York state), but rather limits itself to the rather slight connection of a clock taken from the Amityville house before it was demolished for housing tracts. (In real life the so-called Amityville house is still standing). It’s a rather spurious gimmick in order to spin out another entry in a horror franchise but one that actually works to the film’s favour, for it can be observed that the Amityville series actually becomes far more enjoyable when the sequels stop trying to pose as real-life exposes and start acting as an outright horror films.
Amityville 1992 isn’t really tongue-in-cheek but it doesn’t take proceedings entirely seriously either – it more sets out to be a jolly carnival ride. It’s quite well put together by director Tony Randel. The film works best when playing on the psychology of the characters – Stephen Macht turning brooding and obsessive and who, in one whacked-out scene, pulls a gun on Jonathan Penner accusing him of fucking Shawn Weatherly; Megan Ward’s transformation from bubbly teen to out-to-kill temptress luring her boyfriend to his death. There’s lots of weird play between rooms that open into the past, goo that appears in people’s bed one minute and not the next, and the evil clock that starts burrowing its cogs and screws into the walls of the house. The film gets much sillier when it is required to rely on the usual barrage of slime and makeup effects, it falling down here because these are not very good. Especially poor is the body that comes out of the bath after Penner and in particular the silly scene where Ward’s boyfriend is melted down to a flattened face in a puddle of goo. But mostly though the film is enjoyably enthusiastic fun.
The other Amityville films are:– The Amityville Horror (1979), Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Amityville 3-D (1983), The Amityville Curse (1989), Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1990), Amityville: A New Generation (1993) and Amityville: Dollhouse (1996), followed by a documentary Amityville 2000/The Amityville Horror: 25 Years Later (2000), which tried to examine what happened in the house and ended up reiterating the hoax all over again. The original was remade as The Amityville Horror (2005).
Tony Randel’s other genre films are:– Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Children of the Night (1992), Ticks (1993), Fist of the North Star (1996) and Rattled (1996).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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