Which is harder to swallow: a dollhouse being haunted or a man moving his wife into a home she’s never seen? Either would be unthinkable, yet Amityville Dollhouse gives you both, God love it. (Look, after a lamp, a clock and a mirror, a dollhouse isn’t much of a stretch, but surprising your spouse with place of residence is step one to divorce court.)

Capping off 10 months of he-man construction with his own bare hands, Bill Martin (Summer School nemesis Robin Thomas) has built a brand-new house for his new wife, Claire (Out of the Dark’s Starr Andreeff, whose name looks like the birth-certificate clerk had a stroke while typing), and their blended family of three kids. Inside the property’s original wooden shed, Bill finds a rather intricate dollhouse, which he gives to his daughter (Rachel Duncan, 1995’s Rumpelstiltskin) for her birthday. Because the toy is a to-scale replica of 112 Ocean Ave., Long Island, New York 11701, the Martin home quickly morphs into a metaphor for the dysfunctional American family, complete with a portal to hell via the den’s fireplace.

Yes, Amityville Dollhouse is a stupid title. Yes, Amityville Dollhouse has a stupid premise. No, Amityville Dollhouse is not boring.

How could it be with a giant mouse under the girl’s bed? With zombie wasps that burrow into ears? With the head of doomed That ’70s Show starlet Lisa Robin Kelly bursting into flames? With Claire’s über-nerd son (Jarrett Lennon, Servants of Twilight) being terrified of spiders, but not the reanimated, guacamole-faced corpse behind his bedroom door? With Claire possessed into having MILFy fantasies about sex with her jock stepson (Allen Cutler, The Demon Within)?

The answer: It cannot and is not. I don’t know what Joshua Michael Stern (The Contractor) was thinking when he wrote the script, but I do know I’m glad director/producer Steve White doesn’t seem to have questioned it. Playing like Poltergeist by way of The Brady Bunch, this eighth film in the Amityville Horror franchise is indeed its looniest. —Rod Lott

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Amityville: A New Generation, the seventh in the Amityville Horror series, takes the original film’s tagline of “For God’s sake, get out!” to heart, transferring the devilish deeds from the suburbs to the streets — to be specific, the seediest Los Angeles has to offer. There, an ornately (and garishly) framed mirror has found its way from a certain possessed house in Long Island, New York, to the cardboard abode of a hobo (Jack Orend, Aaah! Zombies!!), who gives it to Keyes (Ross Partridge, Kuffs), a struggling photographer living in the sparsely rented lofts across the street.

Much to the dislike of his ad-exec girlfriend (Lala Sloatman, Watchers), Keyes lugs the demonic mirror into the building, where it causes all sorts of problems for his landlord (David Naughton, An American Werewolf in London), his starving-artist neighbor (Julia Nickson, Ready Player One), her boyfriend (Robert Rusler, Weird Science) and so on. Dead bodies pile up as Keyes experiences startling visions that change his behavior — not unlike James Brolin’s character in 1979’s OG Amityville Horror.

That idea of the sins of the father bubbles to prominence, revealing A New Generation to have more on its mind than mining quick-buck rental dollars. While lesser filmmakers would treat the material as trash, director John Murlowski (Santa with Muscles) and his DP, eventual Oscar winner Wally Pfister (Inception), bring some class to it, pulling off some ingenious shots and in-camera effects as creative as the story’s protagonists. Returning as screenwriters from the previous year’s Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, Christopher DeFaria and Antonio Toro actually make viewers care about Keyes, as does the Dermot Mulroney-esque Partridge, of course, by committing to a performance instead of just cashing a paycheck.

Partridge’s goodwill extends to others around him, including Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) as the investigating detective, Lin Shaye (Insidious) as a nurse and Richard Roundtree (Shaft himself) as a fellow tenant. That a sixth sequel would boast such relative star power is as surprising as the quality of the film itself. —Rod Lott

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After Amityville 3-D bombed big at the 1983 box office, the Amityville Horror franchise retreated to network television for the fourth entry, Amityville: The Evil Escapes. Ironically, this first nontheatrical foray at least had the foresight to bring back original screenwriter Sandor Stern, who also stepped into the bound-to-be-thankless job of directing it.

Recently widowed, Nancy Evans (Patty Duke, Valley of the Dolls) has no choice but to pack up her three kids and go live with her uptight biddy of a mother, Alice (Jane Wyatt, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home), in California. Waiting for Nancy at the stately home is a birthday present shipped from her sister, Helen (Peggy McKay, UFOria): one fugly lamp purchased for $100 at a Long Island yard sale as a gag gift. The gag backfires on Helen, who cuts her finger on this gaudy piece of furniture — imagine Sesame Street’s iconic lamppost as constructed by The Wicker Man’s villagers — and gets tetanus and dies, failing to realize she thrifted among the cursed contents at the cursed Amityville house.

At Alice’s home, the lamp throws everything into disarray. At first, the disturbances are nothing a tube of Neosporin couldn’t solve, then they leap into the sinister with the discovery of Alice’s parrot in the toaster oven (which is probably the title of a Jimmy Buffett song). Other incidents include an out-of-control chainsaw, a sink disposal hand-mauling and strangulation by supernatural extension cord, all culminating in the possession of Nancy’s youngest child (Brandy Gold, Wildcats) and an attic-set showdown pitting a priest (Fredric Lehne, Terror Tract) against, well, the lamp of the damned.

For the virtually bloodless telefilm, Stern brings back several of his 1979 screenplay’s greatest hits: the flies, the red eyes, the sludge, the priest unable to communicate by telephone. Unfortunately, earnest attempts at scares are doomed by mood-killing bright colors, presumably dictated by NBC for prime-time readiness, as Evil Escapes is shot like any of the webs’ disease-of-the-week pics of that era. If made for theaters and aptly cast, with all else being equal, this material could have clicked.

After this, the Amityville sequels were straight to video. Incidentally, the estate sale in the prologue sets up three of them, each following a different object: a clock (Amityville 1992: It’s About Time), a mirror (Amityville: A New Generation) and a dollhouse (uh, Amityville Dollhouse). Producers never got around to all the other items glimpsed, but I’d like to think that an abandoned treatment for The Amityville Thermos sits in a desk somewhere. —Rod Lott

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Made in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, Trapped Alive (or simply Trapped to some) begins as a crime thriller, ends as a subterranean slasher, and fails to fully succeed at either. It’s not for a lack of trying.

Late on Christmas Eve, three felons break out of prison. Led by the port-wine-stained Face (Alex Kubik, Stunts), the trio hijacks a car driven by two young ladies, Monica (Laura Kalison) and Robin (Sullivan Hester), on their way to a party and takes them hostage. All five fall into a nearby mine, which plays home to — what else? — a mutant cannibal (Paul Dean, Annabelle Comes Home). You can guess what happens from there, as long as you think to throw in a sheriff’s deputy (Randolph Powell, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion) who looks like Will Forte.

Being a regional horror film, Trapped Alive is to be approached with lowered expectations, as the clumsy direction by Leszek Burzynski (who wrote the previous year’s Tiny Tim vehicle, Blood Harvest) screams “first feature” as loudly as the actors’ overwrought performances. Nowhere are these deficiencies more apparent when Burzynski has Mindwarp’s Elizabeth Kent deliver a multiple-page monologue in one unbroken take from Exposition City.

Still, the movie gets some things right. What little money Burzynski had at his disposal appears to have been applied wisely to three spots: an impressive mine set, the serviceable monster makeup and the extended cameo by Flick Attack all-star Cameron Mitchell, who, as Robin’s widowed father, has little more to do than drink and fret over her whereabouts. Perhaps he has reason to be worried, with Robin forced to strip to her bra and panties in a contrivance almost the equal of Carrie Fisher losing her dress to a sword-slinging Nazi Munchkin in Under the Rainbow. —Rod Lott

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For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re at the local park on a lovely fall day and you happen to see a gentleman, clad head to toe in a black coat and a black hat, not only buying a young street urchin a large tuft of cotton candy but taking him on a small paddleboat ride across a lake to a desolate clearing. Surely, if you didn’t forcibly stop him, you’d call the authorities, right?

If not, then it’s a good chance you’re the faceless killer of the mostly mundane Italian flick The Wax Mask, a latter-day effort from former masters of horror Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci — who had the good sense to die during production and leave directing duties to special effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti, who, in all fairness, does a pretty capable job.

Inside a randy brothel — one that’s housing some of Italian porn’s finest actors, I’m sure — like many people at the turn of the century were wont to do, a pair of men are placing bets on whether one of them could make it through an entire night at the new wax museum that recently opened down the street. I’m not giving anything away by telling you this white fool gets himself killed.

His corpse, like so many others throughout the course of the film, are used in the wax museum’s life-like (not really) exhibitions, seemingly presided over by a mad scientist — at least I think he’s a scientist — with a de-gloved hand that is seeking revenge on a cheating wife, although I think it’s safe to say he had his revenge by now and is just acting out for attention.

Even though the flick is nowhere near the standards horror fans have come to expect from Argento and Fulci over the years, Stivaletti salvages what he can, relying more on mystery and atmosphere than the usual buckets of grue; but, to be fair, the gore effects are, of course, watchably graphic and suitably grotesque. But, and I ask this rhetorically, is it, as the box copy tells us, the “last great Italian gore film of the 20th century”? —Louis Fowler

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