A pieced together family (divorced father, widowed mother and their respective children) move into a new desert home which just so happens to have a dollhouse of the original Amityville house in its garage (a huge red flag).

There’s a lot going on here with regards to the chaos that ensues whether it’s the giant mouse under the bed (it’s glowing red eyes are a nice homage to the original film), the killer insect that tries to embed itself in the ear of one of the characters (this reminded me of the bug from Hell in Phantasm) or the dream the father has of a child nailing his bare feet to the floor. And that’s just for starters.

Look out for the zombie Dad whose first words to his son are, ‘How’ve you been?’ He slowly decomposes throughout the course of the film.

But the film also veers into much darker territory. Remember the subject matter that raised its head in Part 2? It makes another appearance here. Yawzah.

The characters are also very interesting whether it’s the Wednesday-esque son who is the direct opposite of the jock teen son from the other side of the patchwork family or the sister of the father who owns an occultist bookshop called The Golden Raven and picks up on all things sinister. She warns her brother early on that his family is a lot more fragile than he thinks it is. We then watch the family pretty much disintegrate.

Amityville: Dollhouse shows that later films in horror franchises don’t have to be poorly written pieces of cinematic rubbish but can instead be intelligent, intriguing and imaginative. I’d rather watch a film like this than most of the films in the Halloween series.

3.5 out of 5 stars