Eric Roberts is The Warlock!
If you’re specifically watching the 2015 film, Amityville Death House, because of the presence of Eric Roberts (and seriously, who could blame you?), Roberts appears about four minutes into the film. His first scene lasts about 50 seconds. He pops up a few more times throughout the film and, each time, he’s onscreen for, at most, 20 seconds. Every time that he appears, he is sitting in a room that has been decorated to look like a dungeon. He never interacts with anyone in the cast and, indeed, it’s easy to tell that this is another one of these films where he did all of his scenes in one day and probably didn’t even have to leave his house. He wears a mask throughout the entire film but there’s no mistaking his voice.
Amityville Death House takes place in the town of Amityville, New York and it features a house that looks like a smaller version of the infamous haunted house that appears in most of the other Amityville films. That said, there’s not any reference to the supposed hauntings or the DeFeo murders or any of the other usual Amityville plot points. Instead, this film deals with the spirit of a 17th century witch named Abigail, who was lynched by the inhabitants of Amityville. Eric Roberts plays the Warlock who, for reasons that are never quite clear, hopes to bring Abigail’s spirit back into the realm of the living.
When Tiffany (Kyrsten St. Pierre) comes up to Amityville to check in on her grandmother (Yolie Canales), she finds Abigail’s old diary and realizes that her grandmother lives in Abigail’s former home. Tiffany even reads aloud from the diary, which is not good news for her friends, Aric (Michael Merchant), Bree (Cassandra Hayes), and Dig (Houston Baker). Her friends were just traveling with Abigail to help her out at her grandmother’s place. They certainly weren’t expecting to end up under a witch’s curse thanks to Tiffany’s stupidity.
Even with a running time of just 75 minutes, Amityville Death House is a painfully slow film. Scenes play out with no sense of pace or suspense and the characters are all paper thin. The final ten minutes of the film are enjoyably weird, with the characters suffering from hallucinations, one person turning into a spider, and dialogue like, “She has the witch’s teats!” But it takes such a long time for the movie to reach that point and there’s so much unnecessary padding on the way that many viewers will probably check out before getting to experience any of that.
On the plus side, though, Eric Roberts at least sounded like he was having fun.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
- Star 80 (1983)
- Blood Red (1989)
- The Ambulance (1990)
- The Lost Capone (1990)
- Love, Cheat, & Steal (1993)
- Love Is A Gun (1994)
- Sensation (1994)
- Dark Angel (1996)
- Doctor Who (1996)
- Most Wanted (1997)
- Mr. Brightside (2004)
- Six: The Mark Unleased (2004)
- Hey You (2006)
- In The Blink of an Eye (2009)
- The Expendables (2010)
- Sharktopus (2010)
- Deadline (2012)
- Miss Atomic Bomb (2012)
- Lovelace (2013)
- Self-Storage (2013)
- This Is Our Time (2013)
- Inherent Vice (2014)
- Road to the Open (2014)
- Rumors of War (2014)
- A Fatal Obsession (2015)
- Stalked By My Doctor (2015)
- Joker’s Poltergeist (2016)
- Stalked By My Doctor: The Return (2016)
- The Wrong Roommate (2016)
- Stalked By My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge (2018)
- Monster Island (2019)
- Seven Deadly Sins (2019)
- Stalked By My Doctor: A Sleepwalker’s Nightmare (2019)
- The Wrong Mommy (2019)
- Free Lunch Express (2020)
- Her Deadly Groom (2020)
- Top Gunner (2020)
- Just What The Doctor Ordered (2021)
- Killer Advice (2021)
- The Poltergeist Diaries (2021)
- My Dinner With Eric (2022)
Previous TSL Amityville Reviews:
- The Amityville Horror (1979)
- Amityville II: The Possession (1981)
- The Amityville Cure (1990)
- The Amityville Haunting (2011)
- Amityville: The Awakening (2017)
- The Amityville Murders (2018)
- Amityville Cop (2021)
- Amityville Emanuelle (2023)
