Amityville Asylum

(2013) **

“Teenager” Lisa desperately needs a job and despite flubbing her interview at the newly erected High Hopes Psychiatric Hospital she is hired as a janitor to work the night shift (of course!).  Her excitement over landing the job is short-lived as she begins to see strange things around the hospital.  She has a conversation with a distressed woman in a hallway and later learns that the woman had died earlier in the day (!) and she helps a 13-year old girl back to her room and is later informed by staff that the hospital does not have any teenage patients (!!).  You might think that this would be enough incentive to quit her new job however you are forgetting that we are dealing with an Amityville story here.

Nonplussed by her encounters with apparitions Lisa begins to dig into Amityville’s colorful history.  Apparently she is the only person living in Amityville who has never heard of any of the town’s many horrors; Lisa learns that that the psychiatric hospital, no doubt breaking numerous zoning laws in a residential community, was built on top of the iconic house.  Adding insult to injury she also learns about a Native American cult that practiced witchcraft in order to summon “The Dark Master”, or something like that (give me a break I watched this 3 weeks ago).

Amateur, low-budget, and shot in the UK (one of the characters kept referring to the town as “Uh-middy-ville”), the glacially paced Amityville Asylum will try your patience.  Seriously, when Lisa is first hired at the hospital we are held hostage to long descriptions of her job duties such as this, “The steam is super-heated to 180 degrees and delivered at seven point zero bar pressure.  It can produce 115 liters of super-heated steam per minute … For concrete, mix in one to four parts water.  Brush or spray it on with the equipment here then leave to set for five to ten minutes.  But for those stubborn … marks, use this neat.”  Still with me?    Like most of the Amityville films there is no reason to see this (although I’m still charmed by the Patty Duke installment -  watch it, it’s on You Tube!).