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.”
Eric Roberts appears early on in Shawn C. Phillips’ Amityville Bigfoot. He turns up at the derelict cabin that is purportedly a laboratory for Amityville Chemical and proceeds to dress everyone down for allowing Bigfoot to escape.
It’s not a great role and Roberts is very clearly playing Eric Roberts, but the over the top charisma (and chicklet teeth) of the slumming C-lister is enough to temporarily lift the latest Amityville film out of its doldrums and become something briefly interesting. Not necessarily something watchable, but at least a film that isn’t horrendously boring.
The same cannot be said for the non-Eric Roberts scenes. Phillips, a prolific Amityville contributor, takes a threadbare premise and, along with co-writer Julie Anne Prescott, strings together multiple scenes with humans in front of a camera to create a nearly 90 minute “movie.”
Well…that might be generous. A more appropriate description would be “Multiple (often unrelated) vignettes of a rotating cast of amateur actors, most of whom scream their lines, in an insufferably long 90 minute disaster with barely enough content to fill sixty minutes.” It’s not as bad as, say, the Nick Box trilogy of repurposed Amityville films that felt like poorly executed experimental exercises (Frankenstein, Interview and Elevator), but considering how many times Philipps has revisited this well, it’s hard to shake the idea that the man – who acts, co-writes, and directs this monstrosity – is running on fumes.
That’s not simply because the film is content to poke fun at the Amityville “franchise” or even Phillips himself (one of the final lines is a character acknowledging that “Shawn C Phillips would make a movie like that…He has zero shame”). In fact, if the film had leaned more into self-aware humor like Amityville Christmas Vacation and Amityville Vibrator or more recent entries like The Last Amityville Film and Amityville Ripper, some of this might have been less insufferable.
It’s the glimmers of possibility – an effective joke or a solid practical effect – that makes Amityville Bigfoot so aggravating to watch. At select points, I found myself bemoaning, “if only the rest of the film were like this”; alas those moments are brief and fleeting and then the film returns to its juvenile frat-boy jokes, one dimensional characters (who come and go at a moment’s notice) and the flimsiest of bare bone plots.
The plot, as it were, concerns Amityville Chemical, which is conducting some kind of test on a captured Bigfoot. Researcher Ian (Phillips) is in equal parts lust and competition with co-worker Annie (Amityville Karen’s Lauren Francesca). She is uninterested in Ian, however, because she is secretly part of an animal activist group seeking to liberate Bigfoot, and also because she is in love with the creature.
After co-worker Gregory (Kyle Clarington) allows Bigfoot to escape, boss Simon (David Perry) calls in company boss Dominic before disappearing from the narrative. This happens frequently: characters appear and then immediately disappear or are killed, with little or no bearing on the plot or other characters.
It’s almost as though Phillips had a rotating roster of friends with limited availability, so he just shot random footage at different times with different groups. The result is an overstuffed and underdeveloped collection of actors without relationship to one another, including a group of unhoused people stealing food from a Bigfoot film, a trio of men (and one of their wives) searching for a nudist colony, a YouTuber named Raptor Rich and Waylon (Jake Pearlman), who was recently in a mental institution.
This random assortment of characters would be more tolerable if they were, you know, actual characters. Or if the dialogue weren’t simply a garbled collection of non-sensical statements that plays like bad improv. Or if there was anything resembling conventional plot mechanics, like rising action or even a climax.
So while there are brief glimmers of comedy that works, and some of the deaths are surprisingly effective, these tolerable moments are few and far between. The end result is a long, boring slog of a film; Phillips isn’t just phoning this in, Amityville Bigfoot plays like a filmmaker that doesn’t even care anymore. And it shows.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Eric Roberts: Dominic turns up again in the film’s final moments as the “secret” villain, revealing that he was not only wearing the Bigfoot costume, but got to test the suit’s “fecal dissolving sauce,” “acid breast juice” and Dominic “even got to penetrate a man’s sphincter hole.” That’s just not something you hear every day.
- Good Gore: One thing the film does truly well is gore on a budget, including an impressive decapitation that looks *amazing*. There isn’t a ton of onscreen violence, but when we do see the gory results of Bigfoot’s attacks, it looks great.
- Rape Jokes: In true “poor taste” comedy tradition, there are multiple rape jokes, including Dominic’s aforementioned sexual assault of a (fully clothed?) man, Bigfoot shoving a camera up the director’s ass, as well as Ian’s “comedic” misunderstanding when Annie insists that she was raped by Bigfoot.
- Potty Humor: Phillips is big on potty humor in general: Annie believed she and Bigfoot were in love because she gave it an enema and “extracted his special juices.” In one of the few jokes of this kind that work, a single father trying to impress his daughters on a camping trip catches Bigfoot’s projectile stream of urine in his open-mouth, mistakenly believing it is “golden rain.” The joke goes on for too long, but it is amusing.
- Doggy Death: In one of the film’s most ridiculous moments, Bigfoot steals a baby carriage containing the dog of a nudist, pushes it down a steep hill and then lobs a rock at the pup, causing it to dramatically explode. It’s surreal, bizarre and completely out of the blue, which makes it more memorable than 99% of the rest of the film.
- Meta Moment: At one point the two hot actors from the Bigfoot film take a moment to collect their thoughts after an attack. The female lead, Francesca (Ashleeann Cittell), observes, “You know if this was a movie we would kiss right now?” prompting Eli (Bryant Smith) to respond: “God, I hate that part. Let’s keep moving!” Kinda funny. But then they end up together by film’s end, so what was the point?
- Outrageous Annie: Francesca, whose committed performance was a highlight of Amityville Karen, initially seems completely out of her depth and ill-suited for the role of Annie. As the researcher becomes more hysterically in love with Bigfoot, however, the actress mines a lot of laughter from utterly wild lines like this (after Bigfoot has “died”): “His balls! His poor balls! His special juices! I thought I was gonna live forever!”
Next time: we’re not done with Julie Anne Prescott just yet because she’s also the co-writer of Amityville Turkey Day (2024), the sequel to Amityville Thanksgiving.