As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1988’s Maniac Cop! Directed by William Lustig and starring Bruce Campbell, Tom Atkins, William Smith, Richard Roundtree, and Robert Z’Dar, Maniac Cop is a pulp classic!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime. I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
This Saturday, at 9 pm et, it's Bruce Campbell and Tom Atkins vs. MANIAC COP! Join us for this horror classic! The film is on Prime and Tubi! #DontWatchAlonepic.twitter.com/ZlM9JQTslI
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Deanna Dawn will be hosting David Cronenberg’s Rabid!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime. I’ll probably be there and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
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:
2021’s Amityville Cop does not take place in Amityville.
Actually, as far as I can remember, we never learn the name of the city where this movie is supposed to be taking place. But it definitely is a city and it’s not on Long Island so we can safely assume that it’s not Amityville. It’s not even New York City, which would have at least made the film somewhat Amityville-adjacent.
Amityville Cop also does not feature the infamous house. Nor does it feature a recreation of the DeFeo murders or any conversations about the Lutz hauntings or any of the other nonsense that we typically expect from an Amityville film.
In fact, there’s really no reason for this film to be called Amityville Cop, beyond the fact that Amityville is a recognized brand.
Instead, this is yet another remake of Maniac Cop. This time, the cop in question was a rookie who was either sacrificed by a Satanic cult or who voluntarily chose to be possessed by a demon. It’s a bit hard to follow exactly what happened, to be honest. The head of the cult is played by Laurene Landon, who also appeared in two of Maniac Cop films. Her role is brief but she’s around long enough to ensure that Officer Wilson (Lovie Johnson) will come back to life as a demon who wanders around in the city in his policeman’s uniform and who kills people for the least little infraction. (“No loitering,” he says, before killing one unfortunate homeless man.)
Meanwhile, the non-possessed cops are pretty much useless. Benson (Jason Toler) and his partner, Val (Nicole D’Angelo) are both infamous for roughing up suspects. Tom (Leonard Zhang) is socially awkward and never hangs out with the other cops while off-duty because he’s always too busy taking care of his mother. Cooper (Chris Spenelli) is boring. Lewis (Craijece Danielle) is inexperienced. Detective Clawson (Lisa London) always seems like she’s more interested in going after her fellow cops than the actual criminals. And Chief Benson (Jeffrey Moon) is more concerned with throwing a New Years Party at the station house than actually solving any crimes.
Yes, the entire police force appears to be gathered at the station, partying and dancing as the New Year approaches. It kind of makes you wonder just who exactly is on patrol in the city. Then again, it is New Years Eve. It’s not as if that’s a time of the year that’s associated with people getting drunk and disorderly. Anyway, the important thing that Officer Wilson eventually shows up for the party and soon, the killings start and Tom starts to consider which side he wants to be on.
Where to start with all this? It’s not a very good movie. You probably already guessed that. The awkward dialogue is stiffly delivered, the kills are largely uninspired, and the characters themselves are not particularly interesting. Benson, our nominal hero, literally bullies Tom to the extent that Tom is willing to sacrifice his soul to get revenge but the film never calls him out on it. No one ever says, “Gee, Benson, maybe you went too far when you made fun of his mom.” On the plus side, Officer Wilson is occasionally intimidating. There was one scene where he suddenly comes running down a hallway and, for a few seconds, the film came to life. But it’s hard not to feel that, in our cultural moment, Amityville Cop missed the chance to be something truly subversive. At a time when many people are asking whether we need the police at all, this film asks whether we actually need any more Amityville films.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Tim Buntley will be hosting 2020’s The Oak Room!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime. I’ll probably be there and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Inferno (1980, dir by Dario Argento, DP: Romana Albano)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1980’s Inferno! Dario Argento’s sequel to the original Suspiria is one of his best films, a dream-like exploration of the dark and the disturbing. I can’t wait to share it with everyone!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime. I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Amityville Emanuelle is the latest film about the dumbass Amityville Haunting.
In order to watch any of the many films about the supposed haunted house in Amityville, New York, you need to be aware of two real-life events.
In 1974, a 23 year-old junkie named Ronald DeFeo, Jr. gunned down his entire family in their Amityville home. DeFeo first claimed that unknown gunmen had killed his family while he was out. He then changed his story and said that he killed his family but he did it because he knew they were plotting to kill him. He then suggested that the whole thing was a mafia hit. He then moved on to claiming that his sister was the one who actually killed everyone. And, finally, he claimed that he had been possessed by demonic spirits.
One year later, the Lutz family moved into the Amityville House. After a month, the Lutzes left the house and George Lutz claimed that the house was haunted and that the family had been forced to flee for their lives. Thanks to a book and a few movies based on that book, the Lutzes made some money and eventually ended up suing a lot of other people in order to make even more money. Subsequent owners of the house have never reported anything strange happening while living in the house, other than strangers stopping by to view the supposedly haunted structure.
So, we can either believe that Ronald DeFeo was a junkie who killed his own estranged family or we can accept that the Devil took one look at Ronald DeFeo shooting up heroin and decided, “I’m tired of possessing the innocent and the naïve. I’m going to possess someone who is already so screwed up that no one will even notice that he’s been possessed. That’ll show ’em!”
And we can either believe that a bunch of demons chased George and Kathryn Lutz from their home or we can believe that the Lutzes looked at the success of books and films like The Exorcist and The Omen and they decided that they might as well cash in as well.
Amityville Emanuelle accepts, from the start, the everything was due to the paranormal, which is fine. It’s a movie and Occam’s razor goes out the window when it comes to the movies. George Lutz’s daughter, Laura (Dawn Church), moves into a new house and is soon visited by a strange woman who claims that she is delivering some of George’s belongings. Laura discovers that George owned an urn that was full of Ronald DeFeo’s ashes. Apparently, George and DeFeo had a psychic connection and George, who is insinuated to have been some sort of an occultist, knew that DeFeo was going to murder his family before he even did it.
(Wow, those are some pretty mean things to say about the late George Lutz, who was a real person and not really around to defend himself. Then again, George Lutz would be totally forgotten today if not for the fact that he made up a bunch of stuff about a haunted house so really, Lutz being portrayed as an occultist feels like karma.)
Laura soon finds herself acting in strange ways, picking up random men at bars and then barely noticing when they’re subsequently killed by someone who looks just like Ronald DeFeo.
Meanwhile, Ronald DeFeo’s son, Gordon (Shane Ryan-Reid, himself a director of transgressive films), makes the mistake of using a Ouija Board with his friends and he’s soon having visions of his father killing people.
(Now, I know that some of you are now saying, “Where does Emanuelle fit in with this?” because, after all, the symbol of sexual freedom and experimentation is namechecked in the film’s title. Well, Emanuelle really doesn’t fit into it, unless you include the scene where Laura goes to a bar and picks up two men. But those watching this film because they’re expecting it to be some sort of soft-core haunted house flick are going to be disappointed.)
Amityville Emanuelle is a low-budget and rather dumb film but it is at least partially redeemed by the fact that it doesn’t appear to be taking itself seriously at all and there’s no attempt to convince the viewer that they’re somehow watching anything that could be based on fact. There’s not much in the way of suspense and both the gore and the sex are rather tame but there is a medium (played by Saint Heart) whose generally annoyed attitude is occasionally fun to watch. The Amityville Haunting has always been a particularly stupid story and the cynicism of the majority of people who continue to try to sell it as being fact has always been more than a bit icky so, at this point, Amityville Emanuelle is kind of what the legend deserves.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Deanna Dawn will be hosting 2008’s Cloverfield!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime. I’ll probably be there and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
In 2020’s Joker’s Poltergeist (also known as Joker’s Wild), Eric Roberts plays James Jennings. Jennings was a part-owner of the Palace Theater Chain until his partner, Rand Place (Martin Kove), forced him out and gave the business to his daughter, Aurora Place (Lacie Marie Meyer). After apparently filming himself discussing how he is going to be starting a movement and how no one is ever going to forget him, James dresses up like a clown, goes down to the theater, and guns down the audience of a film called Joker’s Wild. He also kills Rand before being shot himself by another theatergoer, William Remmington (Ari Boyland).
Clips of James’s final message are shown throughout Joker’s Poltergeist but we never actually see Roberts interacting with the rest of the cast. (When James starts shooting people at the theater, he does so under a mask that he never removes and the end credits indicate that an actor other than Roberts played James in those scenes.) This is obviously one of those films where Roberts filmed his scenes over the course of an hour or two, probably in his own office. He certainly wasn’t on the set. The same can be said of Martin Kove, who only appears as a part of a video message that Rand taped for Aurora before the shooting. For that matter, Dustin Diamond appears for a few brief seconds and again, only as a part of a filmed message that Aurora watches.
Instead, the majority of the film takes place a year after the shooting. Aurora is fighting to not only re-open her theater but to also keep concealed carry legal in her state. She is now dating William and is a part of a support group made up of other survivors of the massacre. From the moment Aurora reenters the old theater, she starts to have strange visions of killer clowns, demonic doctors, and sleazy politicians. “You shouldn’t like guns….” the evil doctors chant at her. At one point, she and her friends are trapped in the theater and being taunted by the spirits of the dead and, at another point, Aurora is suddenly in a hospital and being menaced by killer nurses. Aurora struggles to figure out what is real and what is a dream, with the film suggesting that theater itself has become a separate dimension that is populated by James’s victims. At its best, the film plays out like an unsettling nightmare, the type that doesn’t necessarily cause you to wake up screaming but which still remains fresh in your mind throughout the day.
On the one hand, the film is obviously based on the 2012 Dark Knight Rises shooting that it feels more than a little distasteful. On the other hand, the film is intriguingly surreal and Lacie Marie Meyer gives a really good performance as Aurora. (Yes, it would appear that she was named after Aurora, Colorado, which is one reason why the film feels so distasteful even though it has a handful of effective moments.) The film does attempt to say something about guns, with Aurora being a proponent of the 2nd amendment and the gun-grabbing mayor and his wife being behind the efforts to tear down the theater. It’s hard to really say which side the film comes down on, though I think it’s ultimately more pro-gun control than anything else. That said, the film’s portrayal of the mayor and his wife as being vapid politicians who want to keep their own guns while taking away everyone else’s felt true to life.
Joker’s Poltergeist is ultimately a bit too icky and exploitive to really work but it still has its moments. It’s a movie that keeps you guessing, if nothing else.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Travis (Christopher Brown) is a military veteran who is struggling with both PTSD and an addiction to pills. After some unspecified troubles in New York City, Travis and Rochelle (Hailee Lipscomb) move into a new home. The house isn’t particularly fancy and Travis isn’t really sure who Rochelle is renting it from but it does seem like a place where they can start to rebuild their lives. Rochelle has a job at a law firm and is excited that the house has a pool. “I’m going to swim everyday,” she says. Travis, meanwhile, can work on his sculptures in the basement. Travis has a show coming up and it’s important that he get his work done. Perhaps not surprisingly, he spends most of his time sculpting replicas of heads. Perhaps he feels that if he can create someone else’s head, he can figure out what is going on inside of his.
From almost the moment that Travis moves into the house, he starts to feel that there is something wrong with the place. He is haunted by nightmares of finding a body in the pool and of Rochelle calling out for help. He has sudden bursts of rage and paranoia and he soon becomes convinced that Rochelle is cheating on him. It doesn’t help that Rochelle’s friends from college, the materialistic Linda (Sabrina Cofield) and the douchey Tom (Michael Forsch), keep coming by the house. Rochelle is always happy to see her friends but Travis doesn’t feel that he has much in common with either of them. As well, it’s hard not to notice that Tom seems to be obsessed with trying to get Travis, a recovering addict, to drink wine. With Travis convinced that Rochelle is cheating on him with almost everyone that he sees, it doesn’t take much to set him off. Even a simple card game is not a safe activity when Travis is around.
Early on, we discover that Travis and Rochelle’s house is sitting on a street called Shining Way and I imagine that was a deliberate decision on the part of the director. The film has much in common with Stephen King’s classic novel and the subsequent Kubrick film version. Much like Jack Torrance, Travis struggles with addiction and the dark memories of the past. Jack Torrance tried to escape his demons through writing while Travis tries hold them at bay with his sculpting. Much like Jack, Travis has to deal with people who seem to be intent on forcing him to drink despite the fact that they know that Travis has issues with substance abuse. The viewer is left to wonder whether it’s the house that’s driving Travis mad or if Travis was always mad and the house just provided him with an excuse to embrace that madness.
It’s a deliberately paced film, one that occasionally feels a bit too slow for its own good. The movie has a nearly 2-hour running time and it’s hard not to feel that some of the nights with Tom and Linda could have been trimmed down a bit. That said, the overall film did hold my interest (which is no small accomplishment when you consider just how short my attention span actually is) and the film created a suitably ominous atmosphere of growing dread. Travis, bearing both the physical and mental scars of his service, become a symbol of the damage that the horrors of war and addiction can do to both the individual and to society as whole. Darkest of Lies is currently streaming on Tubi.
Through the Shattered Lens 