“Contrary to some plot summaries, director/producer Steve White says the movie is not meant to take place on the grounds of the original house in Amityville. The only connection is that the dollhouse replica of the house had presumably been in the home in Amityville at some point, and was infested with its evil, though he admits this was not explained in the film itself.”
IMDb trivia
Presumably.
That IMDb trivia really encapsulates how much care and effort went into tying these Amityville films to the series. Imagine Scream 9 having “Presumably it is somehow connected to Sidney Prescot or Woodsboro” in the trivia section.
Anyway, a father finds a dollhouse that looks like the Amityville Horror house in the shed of the house he just moved his family into. He has a daughter from a previous marriage that you just know is going to be spooky, but he also has a weird looking stepson that collects bugs, owns a rat and has a dead father. You KNOW that the boy is going to be into something spooky.
Soon enough, the dollhouse starts showing its eerie powers, including heating the house to an uncomfortable degree, starting random fires where fire is already located and destroying gifts so it can become the gift instead. Its greatest power though is anything that happens in the dollhouse, happens in their house. So, if you put a small rat into the dollhouse, then a giant rat appears in the family house. It’s nifty.
Like is tradition with the Amityville movies, the dollhouse also has any random powers that the screenwriters thought of at the moment of writing the script.
The film is competently made, it even has a cool 360-breakfast-table shot, and the acting and script is fine. Like Amityville: A New Generation (1993), it plays more on psychological horror rather than jump scares. The stepmom gets sexually attracted to her stepson and the weird son starts seeing his dead zombie father who implores him to kill his stepfather in a subplot that reminded me of the House series.
I really think that if this wasn’t an Amityville film, it would be better regarded as a cult film.
