Three Dimentions of no dimention at all!!
A sense of morbid curiosity washed over me as I embarked on the odyssey (read: horse-pucky) that is Amityville 3-D. I wanted to know how a movie that was originally presented in 3-D looked like on video where it was presented in 2-D. My answer was to be: A boring, routine haunted house movie occasionally interrupted by moments where I thought to myself "That would have been interesting".
Sometime in the early 1980s, some studio execs ran out of new ideas and decided to give some tired horror francheses a boost with 3-D. Thus we were given three-dimentional sequels to Jaws, Friday the 13th and The Amityville Horror. It is a little ironic that 3-D, a process that is suppose to give a movie more depth, was added to movies that had no depth in any form. Amityville 3-D is a three-dimentional, one-dimentional mess.
Wedged between the formly three-dimentional effects is enough story to fill half of a teaspoon. Woody Allen regular Tony Roberts (he of the Very Brady Perm) stars as John Baxter a reporter who wants to put to rest all these silly notions of ghosts and haunted houses. The movie's opening scene has him and his photographer (Candy Clark) using the Amityville house to conduct a séance where they can expose the events to have been a hoax.
Well, we know they aren't a hoax because we saw the other movies and besides, there is an iron law in horror movies that the skeptic is never right. He is so convinced that the stories are untrue that he actually buys the Amityville house. Not too far fetched because he buys it for something like $1.98. If he had a twenty dollar bill then he probably could have bought the houses next to it because we are informed that all three are unsellable.
The man who gives us this information is the real estate agent played by John Harkins (he was the priest in the "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"). Harkins joins into an interesting trend: Every Amityville movie must have an overweight, 50ish actor who goes upstairs, gets locked in a room and never comes back down. The first had Rod Steiger, the second had Burt Young and now Harkins. Does this count as a trend or blind repetitiveness?
That death scene is explained away by the fact that he was locked in a room with a swarm of flies and then had a heart attack - hardly supernatural. The second death scene is beyond my understanding. Baxter's photographer is killed in a fiery car wreck miles from the house and her charred skeleton lunges at the camera for no particular reason (well, we know why but . . .still).
Anyway, Baxter has moved his family into the house which includes his co-ed daughter Susan (Laurie Laughlin, the mother on "Full House") who takes up space in the room that looks out of one of the house's "eyes". When she later dies in a boating accident - again away from the house - Baxter calls in a team of parapsychologists to investigate (Poltergeist anyone?) The closing scenes are highlighted by Susan's mother (blue-eyed Tess Harper) following her daughter's ghost to the source of the mystery. The "ghost" of Laurie is a 3-D effect that looks less ghost-like and more like a celestial washcloth.
The house itself is a mystery to me. The people who are killed in the house are victims who either went upstairs or down in the basement where a bubbling stone well lies in wait to do . . . something. Seems that everyone who stays on the ground floor is just fine.
The movie is all but forgetteable except for one thing: It features the very first big screen appearance of Meg Ryan. She plays the over-sexed friend of Susan whose most memorable line is "Did you know that ghosts like sex?" No Meg, I didn't know that, but it helps explain that deli scene in "When Harry . . . Met Sally".