Amityville 3-D (1983) Review

"I heard you bought yourself a haunted house."

-Lisa

After busting a group of con artists using the infamous Amityville house for their scam, reporter John Baxter (Tony Roberts) buys the house for cheap.  As he gets settled in, people connected to him start experiencing strange things around the house with some even dying.  John brushes off everything claiming there is a logical explanation, but he is wrong.  Will he accept the truth before it's too late?

What Works:

The opening sequence of this movie is actually pretty solid.  It starts with John and Melanie (Candy Clark), who we are led to believe are husband and wife, arriving at the house to perform a séance to contact their dead child.  After a pretty straightforward séance sequence, John and Melanie reveal they are actually reporters and prove the con artists are frauds.  It's a fun moment and unexpected.  I wish the rest of the film had been more like this.

Finally, there is one solid death.  Surprisingly early on in the film, Melanie discovers a demonic face in a picture she took at the house.  She rushes off the show John, but gets in a car accident.  She ends up getting trapped inside the car and brutally burns to death.  It's a slow kill and surprising because I thought she was going to be one of the two main characters.

What Sucks:

This movie is incredibly boring.  Hardly anything of interest happens and I was begging for it to end.  There are only four death scenes.  One of them is stupid and another is off-screen.  We've seen all of this before and done better in the previous movies.

The 3-D effects are unnecessary and terrible, as to be expected.  There is one in particular of a demonic bug flying at the screen.  It's just the worst and might be the low-point of the movie.

Finally, the characters suck.  None of them are interesting, even two of the teenagers played by Lori Loughlin and Meg Ryan.  John is a skeptic, which is fine, but that's all he is.  His dialogue is pretty much, "There must be a rational explanation," over and over again.  Melanie and Nancy (Tess Harper) are even worse.  They keep talking about how their reality where supernatural stuff is happening is just as likely as John's reality.  It's insufferable all around and I wish they had all gotten killed off.

Verdict:

Amityville 3-D is the low point of the series so far.  The opening is good and there is one cool kill, but the characters suck, the effects are awful, and the movie is boring.

 2/10: Awful