Watching this prompted me to recall a recent small domestic moment. We returned from shopping, and I tried one of the delicious looking plums we'd just bought. I was forced to spit it out. The plum, despite looking OK, was rotten to the core. Amityville Moon looks OK right up until you press play, and then, well, it's unfortunately rotten to the core.
How the producers got access to the Amityville name and implied membership to the franchise is beyond me. It certainly wasn't as a consequence of money being splashed around. This movie obviously had a budget just slightly less than what we paid for the plums.
The acting is atrocious, the scares laughable, the production values negligible and the direction directionless. The monster is someone in a hairy suit. The scenes of monster transformation are, in fairness, passable.
There is one scene, perhaps 2/3rds of the way in, when a young woman has her face ripped off. She had obviously been given a sachet of something red to hide in the palm of her hand. Her instructions? Put both hands up to your face and rub until the sachet bursts and continue rubbing the red goo into your face until the scene stops. It is just awful and not in 'good' awful way.
Speaking of goo, the current colloquial term for boxed wine casks among the young here in Australia is goo bag. I would recommend a goo bag to deal with on screen goo. It might eventually help block out the long shot of the monster running, or the stilted dialogue delivery, or the embarrassing pauses as characters recall lines, or the ... I'm certain that you get the idea.
In short, this is an incredibly bad film. I usually include the qualifier that those involved probably didn't set out to intentionally make a bad movie, but this is so conspicuously abominable that they must have known. Perhaps a quick dud for taxation purposes? I don't know. What I do know is that the film finishes with a young woman sobbing on the front steps and I wasn't far from sobbing myself over the time and money I'd wasted in buying and watching this mess.
Oh, the woman mentioned above does the sachet thing again at the end, but tears are intended this time. Her make up runs and for a fleeting moment she actually, and unintentionally, looked scary. She is the heroine of the piece!
