JB & The Chop Do: Amityville Dollhouse: Evil Never Dies (1996)

“Evil never dies”, eh???? Seems like neither will this fucking franchise. I know that I’ve had fun with these even though JB hates me for picking them. Terrible, terrible shit some of these are but, for the most part, these have been fun – at least fun to put together. Hopefully our relationship can mend once this is all over. (At least I didn’t suggest the Hellraiser movies, JB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

SYNOPSIS: A dollhouse that is a replica of the infamous Amityville haunted house is given to a little girl. Soon after, all sorts of horrible unexplained accidents start to happen. The family must work together to fight off the terrifying evil that has inhabited their lives. – via IMDB

Well, I’ve done everything I possibly could to try and watch this movie but nothing ever seemed to work. I tried Netflix and Amazon, I tried HBO and Hulu, I tried YouTube and even a pirate site but nothing worked. I guess the gods of the Hell of the Burning Corpses didn’t want me to look at this one so I’ll have to do something different. Let’s check out the trailer:

My first impression from that is that it looks really fucking lame with some terrible acting, terrible hairdos and some sketchy “You’re all gonna die” voice over from some old woman. There’s also some gimmicky drawers flying out of cabinets, looks like some shirtless action and, of course, some more fucking flies and hand wounds. Let’s see what an IMDB reviewer has to say:

I hope this is the end to amityville
1/10
Author: fuzzyfeller from USA
16 February 2004
mindless hollywood please stop. amityville has been so burned out its disgusting. and to think a hoax started it all more than 20 yrs prior.

a mirror ,a dollhouse ,,whats next the amityville hair dryer ,a mysterious hair dryer holds the key to the demon ,,a young woman is possessed everytime she dries her hair and the demon doesnt like split ends … this movie is total trash as is the whole amityville fiasco.

It appears Fuzzy Feller wasn’t a fan of the movie or proper punctuation but he sure likes commas!! Let’s give this review a 2 whatever the fuck this is:

Let’s see what else we have….

It doesn’t even deserve one star
1/10
Author: hannah-158 from New Zealand
26 January 2006
This is the most ridiculous movie I have ever seen. Nothing was explained in the end, leaving it open (and Definitely not in the way that makes you hope for a sequel but the way that makes you think “what the hell just happened”) and none of the movie even made sense. Why was the doll house demonic? How did the zombies fit in? Why did the mother fall in love with her stepson? I wasted two hours of my life on this pile of crap. NEVER WATCH THIS MOVIE. And I’m not saying this to make you want to watch it just to see how crap it is. I’m seriously saying GET OUT NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN AND RUN TO ALL YOUR VIDEO/DVD OUTLETS AND BURN EVERY SINGLE COPY OF THIS MOVIE IN Existence. Whoever made it should BE SHOT.

It doesn’t appear hannah-158 was a big fan either… I wonder if she went to every single store in New Zealand and set everything on fire?? Interestingly enough, it seems that there’s a store called “JB Hi-Fi” that sells DVDs down there…. #irony

Moving along….

see Laurie Foreman topless
2/10
Author: movieman_kev from United States
22 May 2005
this idiotic piece of…film written by Joshua Stern (I REFUSE to use your middle name until you do ANYTHING even remotely worthwhile) revolves around haunted doll house (at least it’s not a cookoo clock, I guess). The aforementioned doll house is found by the dad and given to the daughter as a birthday present. that cheap A-hole. Meanwhile Jimmy Martin acts like a nerdy pathetic boy (C’mon kid you were a young Andrew Dice Clay once, get it together). The film is the epitome of stupidity and I’m sure Hollywood will choose to re-make it any day now. Oh yea and the girl that play’s the sister on “That 70’s Show” unleashes her chest pillows for the only time of her career thus far. (the ONLY reason to even think of conceivably maybe watching this movie.

My Grade: D-

Eye Candy: Starr Andreeff shows her left tit briefly; Eric Foreman’s sister..um..i mean Lisa Robin Kelly goes topless

That’s funny – when I first started using IMDB thirteen years ago, I used to read all of Movie Man Kev’s shit – what a blast from the past! Seems he didn’t like this much either but he seems to like this:

I guess that’s enough of this silliness and I guess I didn’t miss much – let’s turn this over to JB for some good reporting!

I got ridiculously fucking excited when this started up. I thought that we were returning to the Amityville house. I thought shit was about to get real again, back to something that would make sense having the name “Amityville” attached to it. I mean, I didn’t expect a masterpiece or anything but I was desperately trying to be more optimistic than required considering the last few debacles from this franchise.

Well, is it bad to say that I liked this one a lot more than the last few, and it is still an extremely flawed and cheesy film? I think I have gotten so used to how utterly crappy these movies are that I have become so desensitised. But this was definitely a step up, faults and all.

I mean we meet this perfectly “happy” family, and their perfect little dream falls apart within days of discovering this dollhouse replica of the Amityville house that we have not seen since it burnt to the ground in Amityville: 3D and assorted stupid flashbacks that have just been there to force the movies to have some weird recurring theme.

This happy family… meeting them all seems strange, but soon you get into the groove of how weird it is. Bill, the dad, has two kids from his previous marriage, Todd and Jessica. His new wife, Claire, has an incredibly socially stunted son named Jimmy. Todd and Jimmy don’t get along, and it isn’t just because of the age gap. Jimmy doesn’t like his new family and misses his deceased dad, and thinks that he is intellectually superior to everyone around him but his mouse, Max. As for Todd? He just doesn’t know where he fits in in the world.

The movie seemed to be incapable of deciding whether the new house was the issue, or if it was the Amityville dollhouse. I mean… there was a newspaper clipping of a house that burned down, and I thought it was the Amityville house in the third movie, but it turned out to be the house that had burned down on the same lot that Bill had built their new family home on? So… is it the current lot that is making the dollhouse evil? Is the dollhouse evil because it is from the Amityville house? I suspect it might be the dollhouse itself that is haunted, though we haven’t seen it before this one?

#continuity

Then, while trying to piece that conundrum together, we see that things that happen in the dollhouse happen in the real house that dad has built new for his family. But how??? It isn’t the same house?! The layout isn’t the same, nothing! So how can you have a mouse crawl in under a dollhouse bed and have a gigantic mouse appear under the new house bed??? WHY??? WHAT DID I MISS???

I thought it was hilarious how Bill’s sister Marla and her squeeze Tobias just happened to be very well versed in the occult. Nice going guys!

Jimmy’s zombie daddy appears later, as well, and his appearance progressively deteriorates. It was so silly, at the end when there is this big but super cheesy showdown going on between him and Bill? He gets hit, and for all his icky skin and stuff, some super regular fleshed out ankles/calves make a brief appearance.

I got drilled about stop, drop and roll as a kid growing up, but it seems that Todd’s girlfriend totally missed all those training days.

Anyway, I don’t even want to discuss how nothing was resolved in this movie at all. I just don’t even know what to do with that. There were holes and contrivances and some really bad and cheesy acting at times, but it was also shot relatively decently and edited far better than the last lot have been. A mess of a movie for sure, and not necessarily so bad it is good, but in terms of this franchise? It is so bad it’s better than most.