Amityville Vampire – review

Director: Tim Vigil

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

This is yet another in the flood of recent films that tag Amityville to the title and, in this case, there is a link at the beginning with the famous series. However, the main film is not connected at all and that additional opening footage (in a different aspect ratio) was directed by someone other than Tim Vigil (I think).

In truth this film nearly got ignored, as I assumed at first that it was a rename of Amityville Harvest. But whilst this isn’t brilliant, it is a nose ahead of the earlier film.

attack in the Amityville house

So it starts at the Amityville house and with a clean-up crew. One of them is sponging down a red wall only to discover that the red is blood and has transferred onto her sponge. The wall starts bleeding (and, given the drip onto her face, so does the ceiling). She tastes the blood on her face and turns, proceeding to attack the other members of the clean-up crew. It has no further bearing on the film that I could tell…

couple

Credits role and we get a vampire within them with fangs protruding from the upper lip (which looked odd). The film changes aspect ratio and goes one month earlier and a guy has taken a woman into the woods. He is clearly trying it on, she seems less than receptive and calls a peck on her cheek “nice”, a description that apparently sticks in the guys incel-driven craw. When he tries to more sexually and aggressively kiss her, she shuts him down and so he storms off, gets in his car and leaves her in the middle of nowhere. The vampire gets her…

Fran and Johnny

Next we meet Johnny (Anthony Dearce), a former DJ and now record producer. He tells a friend that he is due to take his girl, Fran (Miranda Melhado), camping and will propose. Fran, meanwhile, has met with her sister, Margie (Kat Rodriguez), who thinks Fran is a pushover and Johnny not good enough for her – the scenes actually add little to the film. Johnny drives them to Red Moon Lake – and I understand that was going to be the title of this before the Amityville opening and moniker were tagged on.

henchman and victim

On the way to the lake, he tells a couple of stories about how the lake got its name. Both concern a vampire, Lilith (Jin N. Tonic, Dracula in a Women’s Prison). In the first she is a CEO of a company and invites one of her workers, Gloria (Veronica Farren), to her cabin at Red Moon Lake – where, of course, she is the main course. Unfortunately, the balance of this short is all wrong, with a huge amount of dialogue (interrupted by a fantasised kiss) in the office and then her seeing a victim run in front of her car, her punched by the henchman (Tom Newth, also Dracula in a Women’s Prison) and then chained and food in short order.

Chastity and Lilith

The second story goes back into history and, whilst again it had much dialogue at the head, this one worked better. Caleb (Randy Oppenheimer, Blood Moon Rising) has had to bury his daughter, Chastity (Haillye Young Miller) and his wife (Maggie Nolting) is dying. He is praying to God for her, but God seems deaf to his pleas. A knock at the cabin door and he meets Lilith, who asks for an invitation and suggests she can cure his wife. She even has Chastity with her, raised from the dead. Of course, eventually, he invites them in and leaves them with his wife. The next night all three women feast on him. This is a surprisingly well-done segment compared to the previous it paces well and the attack is rather visceral. Don’t get me wrong, it is probably not worth the entrance fee, but it beats the other parts.

kidnapped stripper

After a side-bar for a pee-stop and some jealousy over a sexually aggressive fan (Laura Meadows), which added little to the film, Johnny and Fran are in the woods but also, as night falls, are three ne’er-do-wells who have brought a stripper into the woods, bound and gagged, to torture, rape and kill – whilst filming the whole thing. The stripper, one complains, is cold to touch and to us looks a whole lot like Lilith… When she does vamp out, she has the fangs coming out of the top lip motif from the credits.

attack

The issue – beyond some general film-making problems – is that this does nothing, it is an anthology but the parts aren’t strong enough to wow us and the over-arching story gets bogged down in the lives of the protagonists. That said we get some lore – Lilith is the biblical Lilith, vampires reflect in natural mirrors and only fail to reflect in man-made mirrors and they need an invitation – but there is too little narrative to need a whole lot of lore. That said it holds together better than Amityville Harvest. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK