Amityville in the Hood

Prolific trash-peddler Dustin Ferguson brings us his third Amityville film.

This time the script is basically if a high schooler from suburbia wrote a script about 'gangsters in the hood'. The F word is said constantly, everyone talks about drugs, there is a 5 minute scene where a guy haggles with a prostitute before she gets killed for giving poor head.

The plot is supposed to be about a load of marijuana that was grown in the Amityville house makes anyone who smokes it kill. What we actually get, like most of Fergusons films, is two people talking for minutes at a time about the plot. We also get a VERY long recap of his previous two Amityville films.

At least there's a kinda funny so-bad-its-good rap theme song.

CGI 1/10 In the beginning something gets shot through the window of the Amityville house's window, and it looks like a 30x30 pixel sprite. The blood splatter is so wrong it looks like they spit up a handkerchief. The smoke CGI looks like they took it from a 3dxmax smoke tutorial.

Sound 3/10 Bad echoes. It's clear the sound person has the shotgun mics pointed at the wrong people at some points.

Sound effects 3/10 But just wrong. How do you get the gunshot sound so wrong? The only sound that was right was the Siri sound.

Lighting 1/10 The only scenes that are lit well are the ones filmed outside in daylight. Some scenes have harsh red lights for no reason except maybe a lame attempt to portray evil.

Writing 3/10 I've met sailors who swear less than some of the characters. I'm not to if it was writing or editing but one scene has a lady give birth to a daemon baby, then later the same still pregnant lady gets murdered.

The music that isn't stock is painful and repetitive. They inserted a needless driving scene just so they could add a very bad rap song.

This film begins with a couple of thugs entering the infamous house in Amityville to harvest a large amount of marijuana they had planted inside of it earlier. Unfortunately, after filling a large bag of their illegal substance, once outside of the house, they encounter another group of thugs from a rival gang who kill them and take everything they had. The scene then shifts to a police officer in Compton, California by the name of "Detective White" (Thom Michael Mulligan) being asked to investigate a series of bizarre murders resulting from what appears to be the product of a new strain of marijuana which induces homicidal behavior. Or something like that. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that the director (Dustin Ferguson) borrowed heavily from his earlier films "Amityville Toybox" and "Amityville Clownhouse" in the production of this film. And considering that both of these two films were extremely bad, I'm not sure that this was the wisest decision on his part. But I will leave that up to the individual viewer to decide. One thing I can say, however, is that Dustin Ferguson didn't learn much from his previous experiences because this film had the same basic faults as his previous films which includes bad acting, uneven audio technique, awful music and a completely ridiculous plot. That said, as far as his Amityville movies are concerned, the third time is definitely not the charm, and I have rated it accordingly.

Just because you can put the word Amityville in any movie title and get people to watch it, doesn't mean you should! Somebody somewhere realised that the producers of the original Amityville films don't own the rights, or indeed anybody. As the Amityville Horror was based on a news article and/or true events. It's a non copyrightable subject matter, meaning any chump can make an Amityville movie. It's not even finished yet. This will continue. Amityville in the hood is a massive drag, there wasn't anything watchable at all. It only runs for 70 minutes, and 20 minutes of that is credits, another 20 minutes is some guy just driving round the "hood".

After a drug deal gone wrong, a gangster learns that his associates have stolen a crop of strained marijuana taken from the location of numerous murders years earlier and has infected the streets causing a wave of violence to be unleashed and forcing a detective to find a way of stopping it.

This one managed to be a bit better than expected. Among the better features here comes from the strong central storyline about the new cursed item escaping Amityville and arriving in the outside community. The means of the tainted drug escaping through the means of a gangster's turf war and getting sold on the streets behind the main gangster's back starts a frantic search for the mystical weed. On top of that, the resulting police investigation into the series of murders taking place there all combine together for a solid enough pretense of the main storyline here. As well, there are several halfway decent action scenes that come about here to provide some excitement to this. The opening gangland ambush and the various interactions between the gangster boss and his assistant offer up a decent enough setup to generate an idea of what's happening with the cursed strain getting loose in the community. Being shorter sequences, the longer battles here involving the possessed gang member snap and going crazy on the other gang members or the encounters following that involving the possessed individuals give off some longer scenes that are cheesy fun in this style which holds this one up. This one does have a few issues with it. One of the biggest factors here is a confusing setup to introduce the private investigator into the somewhat backward storyline. Between a call involving officers in different sections of the country, the wrong police officer reveals crucial information to the other when he couldn't have known about it due to geographical and time disparities, coming off rather awkward. There's also a series of energy-draining and momentum-stopping scenes showing off the low-budget and padding found here with the flashbacks to different films and music video montages keeping the action down. These factors end up being the main drawbacks here.

Rated Unrated/R: Extreme Graphic Language, Violence, and drug use.