Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
After toiling in the trenches with Nick Box’s three releases from the week of April 13, it’s something of a relief to jump ahead to May 8, 2023 with a discussion of Louis DeStefano’s Amityville Emanuelle.
Presumably influenced by the French book and film series of the same name (minus the extra “m”), Geno McGahee’s screenplay returns to a tried and true Amityville premise: a cursed object, a spectral haunting, and some sexy shenanigans.
Amityville: Emanuelle immediately situates itself within the “franchise”s canon with recreated footage of Ronald DeFeo’s murder spree in April of 1974. This is familiar territory: we’ve seen variations of the shootings in Amityville II, The Amityville Legacy, Amityville: The Awakening and more.
It makes sense that the specter of DeFeo haunts the proceedings because the urn containing his ashes is the cursed object in question. The narrative follows two different points of connection: DeFeo’s troubled son, Gordon (Shane Ryan-Reid), and Laura (Dawn Church), who is gifted the ashes by a mysterious woman named May (Jocelyne Lew).
Initially the connection between the pair is uncertain…until Laura’s last name is revealed to be Lutz. This is intriguing for fans of the “series”: the Lutz name was a point of contention in the original lawsuit filed by the real-life owners of 112 Ocean Avenue whose story inspired the original The Amityville Horror book and film. When the Lutzes lost their lawsuit against producer Dino De Laurentiis, it opened the floodgates for all of these Amityville titles to be made, so long as the name Lutz was not involved.
So what makes Amityville: Emanuelle exempt? Well, technically Laura Lutz is a fictional character (as opposed to Cathy and George) so McGahee is on a bit of a slippery slope, but technically this is a fictional character. Still, for those who know their Amityville lore, Laura’s inclusion plays like a nod towards verisimilitude. She’s an attempt to ground this otherwise ridiculous film in some kind of reality.
In the film, Laura’s dead father George was fascinated by the occult and he had visions of the DeFeo murders before they occurred. George eventually moved into the murder house to seek answers (ie: gain power from the gates to hell), but before he perished, in true “bad form” form, George coordinated with May to have DeFeo’s ashes sent to Laura.
This backstory is intriguing, but related principally as exposition (there are no visuals outside of the DeFeo shooting that opens the film). The meat of the text involves Laura tracking down Gordon, the pair discovering that they share visions of Ronald DeFeo and teaming up to send the vengeful spirit back to hell.
Still, there’s something kind of charming about DeStefano’s film. Perhaps it’s because the film isn’t a repurposed Frankenstein text with a changed titled for cash-grab purposes (looking at you, Mr. Box). Instead it’s an honest to goodness attempt to make an (admittedly silly) Amityville film.
The other aspect that works – for the most part – is the cast, particularly a spiritual medium named Janet (Saint Heart), who is recruited by Gordon’s overly concerned girlfriend Gena (Allie Perez). Janet is introduced with a shock of pink hair and the demand that Gena look after her cat Roman in the event she’s killed. Naturally this immediately makes Janet the kookiest/most enjoyable character in the film.
Joining Janet, along with Gena and Gordon, is Laura’s supportive best friend Allie (Linda S. Wong) and Laura’s love interest Evan (Chris Spinelli). Together the group must gather in Laura’s house and perform an exorcism, though considering the film’s brief runtime, this all takes too long to come together, resulting in a brief climax that feels rushed and too simple.
So why is the film called Emanuelle? Well, Janet immediately identifies that DeFeo’s spirit is interacting with Gordon and Laura in different ways. Father is aggressive with son, but – as Janet colourfully explains – he “wants to sex up Laura.” This means that Laura spends the film indulging in her aggressive sexual impulses, including casual sex with Evan on the first date and a threesome with Tom (Jorge Meneses) and Phil (Spencer Cadigan), two men she meets at a bar.
It’s worth noting that Laura’s sexual appetite is remarked upon, but never judged. Allie warns her to be safe when she leaves the bar, and Tom’s issues with Laura involve a moment of gay panic (he doesn’t understand how a M-M-F throuple works) and when he sees DeFeo’s spirit in her bathroom mirror.
Aside from this, however, Laura’s desire for sex is treated as normal and healthy, which feels surprisingly progressive. With that said, and given the film’s use of the Emanuelle in the title, it should be noted that all of the sex, including the threesome and her one-night stand with Evan, is very PG fashion. Amityville Vibrator this ain’t.
Alas the film falls down in its last act, as Evan is possessed by DeFeo and chases everyone around the house like a live-action Looney Tunes bit. It’s played for comedy, especially Spinelli’s over the top line delivery of “Come to daddy” (oddly enough, his villainous turn plays like a bizarre cross between Hellraiser and Bob from Twin Peaks). Still, it’s all too rushed and shoddily filmed to be successful, and the six months later coda that ends the film – staged like the punchline from a ’90s sitcom – falls flat.
Overall, however, the film feels like a return to form – at least for these later entries in the “series.” It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it *is* a proper indie film with actual characters, reasonably adept actors (Lew’s bizarre vocal affectation aside), and some genuine ties to established Amityville conventions.
The film would have benefitted from being sillier or more serious, but in the wake of Box’s trifecta of uninspired texts, Amityville: Emanuelle winds up playing like art cinema.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Brief Runtime: Like many of the recent texts, the film clocks in at a scant 64 minutes. In the bad Amityville films, this is cause for relief. In a film like Emanuelle, this means that there’s simply not enough time spent to develop the characters, which isn’t helped by the fact that McGahee introduces far too many of them.
- More Janet! In a stronger version of this, there would be 10 more minutes of breathing room to introduce Janet, build to the exorcism circle and negotiate the fall-out. As it is, we barely get a taste of Janet, which feels criminal.
- The Rules of Engagement: Possibly my favourite interaction in the film finds Laura negotiating her sexual encounter with Tom and Phil in the bar. The latter immediately understands what she is proposing, whereas Tom needs clarification for everything. “I don’t think she’s asking us to plow each other” Phil candidly explains to his friend, which is a genuinely hilarious response.
- Sex Music: Perhaps it’s a byproduct of low budget filmmaking, but DeStefano’s decision to license “I Can Learn To Fly” by Ge Filter Fresh, the most generic Muzak imaginable, for the threesome sex scene absolutely does not work. It’s tonally incongruous with the visuals to the point of distraction!
Next time: it’s remake time! No, we’re not talking the Ryan Reynolds ab-tastic 2005 text, but rather director Éric Tessier’s The Amityville Terror, a new take on the 1990 Canadian film The Amityville Curse.