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Film: Amityville: A New Generation
Year: 1993
Director: John Murlowski
Writer: Christopher DeFaria and Antonio Toro
Starring: Ross Partridge, Julia Nickson and Lala Sloatman
Review:
This film begins with couple living together. The man is played by Ross Partridge and his live-in girlfriend Lala Sloatman. She works in a corporate job and she is pushing Partridge to join the place she works as a photographer. That is what he does, but he does it for art. We also learn that he doesn’t talk much about his past. He claims it is because he doesn’t remember it.
We hear some pounding on a door. The man played by Robert Rusler. He has been seeing the woman who lives inside for less than a week and she is already breaking it off. The woman who lives there is played by Julia Nickson. She is a painter and she is good friends with Partridge. She is thankful that he sends Rusler away.
They leave the building to go to a local café and run into their landlord, played by David Naughton and his wife played by Barbara Howard. Partridge and Nickson tell Naughton that they have something to run by him. He states that he needs to get cleaned up and he will meet up with them later.
It ends up being that Partridge and Nickson have come up with the idea to use the whole building they live in for an art show. There is another man who lives there who does sculptures as well. Naughton shoots it down immediately. He does relent enough to hear them out later. While they are talking, Partridge takes a picture of a homeless man as he slides out of his cardboard box.
Partridge goes across the street to give the man some money and a note, the man is played by Jack Orend. Partridge tells him that he thinks he can sell the picture, so he doesn’t want to be the only one benefiting from it. Orend ends up giving Partridge a gift, a mirror that has been in his family for generations.
At the meeting, we see the other man living there is played by Richard Roundtree. All of the artists really want this show as well as Howard and Sloatman. They convince Naughton to allow it happen. Sloatman finds the mirror that was given to him and she thinks it is ugly. Nickson on the other hand loves it and asks if she can have it. Sloatman says she can and Partridge allows it.
That night Rusler shows back up. He is drunk and angry. He has a knife and starts to destroy some of her paintings. He ends up looking at himself in the mirror and his image begins to change. He gets cuts all of his face. He freaks out and runs. He trips and goes head first into a window, making him look just like his image. He dies. An image of the Amityville house appears in the mirror.
The police show up and they are led by Terry O’Quinn, who is a detective. He speaks with everyone and takes official statements. We then shift to Nickson, who is sad. There is glass and the knife that Rusler used still on her floor. She picks up some glass and makes cuts into her wrist. She stops though and looks at her image in the mirror.
During the meeting, she told everyone that she used to be haunted as a child by demons that would dance for her at night. She ends up painting these demons. Naughton comes to her apartment and she shows what she has done to him. She then comes on to Naughton who tells her that he has found her to be beautiful. They get interrupted when O’Quinn comes to the door. Partridge is also called over.
The mirror takes Nickson as well. It first wakes up one of the demons she painted and pushes her to hang herself. That night, Partridge has a nightmare that shows the Amityville House and of a family at a dinner table. The father is sharpening a knife.
Patridge gets a call in the night to come identify a body from O’Quinn. Patridge assumes it is someone he knows, but he gets down there to be the body of Orend, the homeless man. There was a note that led O’Quinn to contact him, but Patridge states that he doesn’t know him. Partridge does offer to pay for a proper funeral. O’Quinn does find this odd.
There is a connection between Partridge and Orend, but what is it? Orend has a past that is important to what is happening in this apartment building. Will Partridge learn what it is before it is too late? Who else will die before he does? Will the art show still go on as planned? Will Partridge be able to keep it together until he can figure out what is going on?
I have given a couple of the Amityville sequels the same critique, which I think they do something interesting to keep the story moving along. I think that the acting is pretty good, especially Nickson and Naughton. They both have been in other things where they have been better though. The concept isn’t bad, but it definitely not great by any stretch. I really like the idea of the mirror changing how things are seen, since that is something that could be scary to see. I also think the death scenes aren’t all that bad, except the first one. I don’t see how he died from his minor injuries.
The biggest gripe is another one that I had with other films from this series that they take the Amityville name and add on to it. This is a problem because this film changes things that have happened in past films. This one is claiming that the homeless man is the eldest son of the DeFeo film. The problem is they changed how he killed his family. I think that this film would have been better chance if it would have tried to stand alone instead of continuing the Amityville line. There really is only a couple references to Amityville, just enough to make it part of the series. I also think that the death scenes are too spaced out, this causes the film to be slower and it hurts the building of tension.
I wouldn’t recommend seeing this one unless you are a fan of the series and are out to see all of the films. The acting is decent, the story is okay and it has some nice back-story that makes it interesting, but also violates what really happened and in past films. This film is kind of boring and drags on for a stretch. Some of the death scenes aren’t bad. There are definitely better haunted house films out there, unless you are interested in watching a sub-par one, then I would recommend giving this one a viewing.
My Rating: 4 out of 10