Amityville: Where the Echo Lives (2024)

Amityville: Where the Echo Lives (2024)

Directed by Carlos Ayala, who is also executive producer.
It’s crazy: a film is supposed to entertain, distract and relax, yet this one is synonymous with the most profound boredom.

I found a review that perfectly sums up what one can easily think of this pseudo-movie:

“What kind of film is this???

I didn’t even manage to finish the film, there was nothing, the music is unbearable, really, usually there’s always something to hold on to and keep going, but here, it’s empty.

A no-budget, failed, uninteresting and deadly boring B-movie…”

The only thing I don’t agree with is the music… which I really liked! They are sometimes simplistic, but pleasant to the ear.

But yes: this film is an interstellar void of no interest whatsoever. I had a feeling right away that it was going to be very long, but unfortunately I always watch to the end.

You could say that the Amityville saga is a special case in the film industry and in the horror industry. In any case, in the 70s and 80s, it was easy to tell that a new Amityville film was more or less a sequel to the previous one. The house was destroyed in the third film, for example, and in subsequent films we have to deal with haunted objects coming from the house. After that, things became a lot less clear. Why do you ask? It’s quite simple: Amityville is the name of a town!

As a result, Amityville is impossible to copyright. However, the mere name of Amityville (despite a quality that has probably been declining for fans since the early 80s and the immoral Amityville 3D) has a gift, in this case that of attracting the curious. And while up until 2005, all the films with the Amityville label could clearly be included in the same saga, right up to the Andrew Douglas remake, it’s only from 2011 onwards that things get more complicated, with titles being released as quickly as a nymphomaniac in an Amsterdam brothel. And sometimes, troubling names come up more than once. We could mention Mark Polonia, who in 2015 delivered Amityville Death House, then returned with Amityville Exorcism in 2017, Amityville Island (yes, why not?) in 2020 and Amityville in Space (at this point) in 2022. Do you think we’ve hit rock bottom? Do you know Dustin Ferguson? Well, we owe him an Amityville Toybox in 2016, an Amityville Clowhouse the same year and an Amityville in the Hood in 2021!

Surprisingly, I found The Amityville Moon (2021), the werewolf film, quite enjoyable. It’s not good, but it’s unpretentious and quite funny.

And so we come to today’s film, Amityville: Where the Echo Lives, which, like so many other crappy Amityville films, has a pretty intriguing cover. A film that’s nothing like Amityville except for the name, and for good reason: it was called The Girl from the Other Side until Lionsgate bought the rights and renamed it for a VOD (Video on Demand) release in October 2024.

It’s broke, it’s clumsy, it tries to stretch its running time by every possible means (explanatory texts, a character who drinks orange juice for three hours, black backgrounds that are far too long everywhere).

So, to sum up: an hour and a half of interstellar emptiness where nothing happens, excessively long black backgrounds, lots of scenes where you wonder if the orange juice is really that good! Of course it is, but you don’t need to see a chick drinking it all the time to know that!

And I could even say that two shower scenes are a lot, especially as we don’t even see any tits! That would have been the only interest, but at least it would have been a tiny one.

Sarah McDonald has good charisma though. I hope I’ll see her again in a good film. But it’s safe to say that no one in this film plays well. Please avoid it in order to save your precious time and part of your fleeting life!

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