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.”
Welcome back to a new year of The Amityville IP. With Amityville Scarecrow, this editorial series leaves behind the scant four “franchise” titles released in 2021 for the gargantuan ten titles released in 2022.
While Scarecrow is a similarly low budget production with some dodgy script decisions (courtesy of screenwriter Shannon Holiday), the emphasis on fractured family dynamics feels more in keeping with the early Amityville entries.
For no apparent reason, the film arbitrarily changes the mythology of the series. In Scarecrow, the Amityville murders were committed by “the Richards brothers,” not by Ronald DeFeo. After the family home was razed, a summer camp was built on the property, but the land became cursed.
When the film opens, adult sisters Tina and Mary (Amanda-Jade Tyler and Kate Sandison) meet to discuss the dormant Amityville Cornfield they inherited from their mother. The relationship between the women is noticeably cool: Tina slept with Derek (Andrew Rolfe) when he was still with Mary and the women haven’t spoken to each other in years. For added dramatic effect, each woman also has a(n adult) daughter with Derek: Tina has Harriet (Sofia Lacey) while Mary has Lucy (Chelsea Greenwood).
The attempted reconciliation between the sisters occupies most of the film’s narrative, which is simultaneously Amityville Scarecrow’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness. While the dedication to characters is a welcome change for a film series that frequently fails in this capacity, Amityville Scarecrow misunderstands how compelling it is to watch the women patch things up or how invested the audience will be in the outcome.
Not helping matters is the bloated inclusion of a Nightmare on Elm Street-esque backstory. Tina and Mary’s mother murdered the camp pedophile after he killed Tina and Mary’s older sister, which explains the origin of the curse on the land, as well as the reanimation of the titular killer scarecrow (played by Richard Lovell).
What follows is a series of low stakes murders, investigatory reveals, and a lot of corn imagery. This is a pretty standard low-budget slasher that places too much emphasis on bland character dynamics. Overall Amityville Scarecrow isn’t bad; it’s just not very memorable.
With that said, though, it’s still more competent and watchable than many of the other DTV entries!
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Recurring Player! If Tyler’s name seems familiar, it’s because she was the villain in the (unrelated) film, Amityville Witches.
- Pacing! One persistent issue is how needlessly drawn out and repetitive the film is. Tina and Mary revisit the same conversation over and over and over again, which really bogs down the film’s pacing. Shaving ten minutes off the ~90-minute runtime would have helped to keep things moving and ensured that actors weren’t repeating the same lines of dialogue all of the time.
- Action! One wishes that director Peter Jack Mundy was better at staging the action sequences. There’s a reasonable amount of violence, particularly in the last act, but it’s often pedestrian or perfunctory. More thrilling action sequences would have helped to boost the film.
- Acting! Most of the performances are passable, particularly Lacey and Greenwood, though Sandison struggles to deliver whenever Mary is asked to emote. Thankfully the worst performance in the film, delivered by Marek Lichtenberg as James, is also the film’s opening kill.
- Dialogue! It’s hard to make corn – or the lack thereof – scary (see also: the Children of the Corn franchise), but it’s especially difficult to make tin-earned dialogue like “It’d be nice if, after all these years, the corn actually grew” work.
- Accents! Lichtenberg’s accent makes no sense for the film, but special shout-out goes to Lacey who at one point manages to make Amityville a four syllable word (ah-mi-ty-ville).
- Sequel! Yes, there is a sequel to this film, though oddly enough it doesn’t appear in the official Wikipedia list of the “franchise” films. Anyways, we’ll get to it soon enough.
Next Time: It’s time to call wrap on Thomas J. Churchill (Amityville Harvest, Amityville Moon) as he returns for his third film in the “series,” zombie title: Amityville Uprising (2022).