Editorials
Is ‘Amityville Ride-Share’ Secretly Self-Aware? [The Amityville IP]
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
We’ve finally arrived at the first of ten 2023 Amityville titles! First up is writer/director Jack Hunter II’s Amityville Ride-Share, a ~60 minute found footage film featuring loosely interconnected (or not) clips.
In some ways, Ride-Share feels reminiscent of the ill-advised pandemic title Amityville Hex, which exclusively featured YouTube creators doing their take on a viral video challenge (ironically several clips in Ride-Share feature this exact same idea, albeit under the challenge is under a different name and premise).
The difference between this and Hex, however, is that there appears to be a knowing wink of self-awareness to the material. And while that may be giving Hunter II and dialogue writer Dann Eudy too much credit, even if it is unintentional, the bizarre meta commentary about gimmicky, cash grab sequels makes Ride-Share more interesting in the long run.
The film begins with a disclaimer that the footage we’re about to see was found abandoned in an Amityville home and that “the video clips you are about to see may not make sense…” This is something of a challenge: it’s either Hunter II’s premature defence against criticism or it’s a hilarious acknowledgement of the “franchise”s notorious refusal to employ things like logic or continuity.
The first few video clips are cam footage from a ride share featuring a male driver and a middle aged female customer. The pair make uncomfortable small talk (she mentions she just got out of jail, and he asks how it was without a hint of irony). Suddenly the words “initiate sleep mode” appear on screen and the woman falls asleep. The driver’s face begins to morph back and forth with Henry (Hunter II himself), then the woman is driven to a crowded warehouse and asphyxiated with a garbage bag.
It’s a solid start for a film, but it quickly devolves into complete disarray. A man named Frank is called, who proceeds to alert a reporter named Kelly (Mary LeBlanc Zaunbrecher), but then Frank is bonked on the head by a clown and both he and the ride-share woman’s bodies disappear before Kelly arrives.
These opening scenes are emblematic of the film’s pros and (many) cons. The sound is rotten (the ride-share woman is barely audible), the “score” – five seconds of distortion on a loop – is abrasive, and the acting is often quite amateurish.
And yet there’s also a sense of unpredictability to Amityville Ride-Share. It’s rarely clear what, if anything, is important, and the constant whiplash between scenes, characters, and temporal setting often makes the low-budget found footage a perplexing mystery, a bizarre oddity, and/or (occasionally) legitimately unsettling.
Case in point: at one point Amityville Detective Whyte (Milton Cortez) appears in a black and white PSA on public access television to comment on the recent spate of murders of local teens, as well as the recent abduction of 15 year old Taylor Marks. Immediately following this, there is a prolonged sequence of handheld footage of the two kidnappers in long-haired wigs threatening the girl with a sickle; the effect has the same grainy quality of a real life hostage video or even a snuff film. (Think amateur The Poughkeepsie Tapes, albeit with garish CGI blood that don’t even come from Taylor’s amputated hand, but rather flows over the screen like a waterfall.)
Several clips reference urban legends, including the aforementioned YouTube viral challenge about the Red Knight, which is an obvious rip-off of Bloody Mary or Candyman.
Then there’s the final sequences, which feature a mother warning a group of girls at a slumber party about Buttons the Clown, who was killed Freddy Krueger-style by angry townspeople for pedophilic activities. This last bit is genuinely harrowing as Buttons and several other clowns are seen on black and white Amityville CCTV, stalking and abducting the girls from deserted streets.
While many of the clips go nowhere or are unconnected to each other, the Henry character pops up sporadically to yell and mug for the camera. Henry is a recurring character in Hunter II’s other films, and his appearances here feel (lightly) evocative of BOB from Twin Peaks. Between him and the diversity of the clips, Amityville Ride-Share sometimes feels like a series of bizarre creepy pastas about a town under siege by dark forces that take the appearance of clowns.
Which brings us to utterly baffling end credits, which begin…then pause so that Hunter II can include ten minutes (!) of trailers for his found footage “series” Paranoia Tapes. Initially these play like real trailers for fake movies (a la opening sequence of Scream 4), but IMDb genuinely lists these ~12 films as part of the “longest running found footage franchise in cinema history.”
What makes this so bizarre? The titles of the Paranoia Tapes bear a striking resemblance to the nonsensical pathway that films using the Amityville IP have taken. Consider some of the ridiculous titles, which include ‘Kennel House’ (entry 4), ‘Siren’ (entry 3), ‘DVD+’ and ‘DVD-’ (entries 8 & 9) and – the most Amityville-like of them all – ’06.06.06’ (Amityville 1992: It’s About Time anyone?)
The fact that these films seemingly dip into other horror subgenres, bear virtually no connection to each other outside of their titles (and the Henry character), and, for all intents and purposes, are basically just low-budget cash-grabs, is all very telling.
Is this Hunter II commenting on the Amityville series? Or he is simply a savvy filmmaker who hitched his own low budget found footage franchise to a larger IP, knowing that an Amityville film was more likely to break out than Paranoia Tapes? I bet it’s the latter, but considering the playful opening of the film, it seems clear that the writer/director has a sense of humor.
At the end of the day, Amityville Ride-Share is undeniably a crap shoot: technically the film is a total mess (sound, dialogue, performance) while the clips alternate between frustrating, barely watchable, and genuinely harrowing. It’s not a great film by any measure, but as a found footage exercise, it is…unique.
Next time: we jump ahead to March of 2023 with writer/director Evan Jacobs’ comedy Amityville Death Toilet.
Lionsgate’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 launches a reboot trilogy based on the 2008 home invasion film, all three movies shot simultaneously under the direction of Renny Harlin.
To tide you over until Chapter 2, Chapter 1‘s home video release offers an audio commentary from star Madelaine Petsch and producer Courtney Solomon that hints at what’s to come.
Here are six things I learned from The Strangers: Chapter 1 commentary.
1. The opening music cue was inspired by The Shining.
The film’s opening establishing shot roving over the woods — with Bratislava, Slovakia standing in for the small town of Venus, Oregon — evokes the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which was also a point of reference for the score.
“When we were scoring this, we looked at The Shining,” says Courtney Solomon, referring to Wendy Carlos’ iconic main title theme. “‘Cause we were looking for how, even though it’s dated, they were in that open, sort of everything environment, musically.”
Justin Caine Burnett (I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, 9-1-1: Lone Star) composed the score.
2. The cold open features an important character to the trilogy.
Shot together like one long movie, The Strangers trilogy will take place over a four-day period, with each subsequent entry picking up immediately after its predecessor’s finale.
Chapter 1‘s cold open features actor Ryan Bown — doing his own stunts, as Petsch points out — as a character who will play a bigger role in the coming installments.
“Jeff Morell, we’ll come to find out who this guy is as we go through all three chapters, but we sort of begin here,” Solomon notes.
“He’s a pretty important piece to this puzzle,” teases Petsch. “Some might say the piece.”
They also hint that viewers haven’t seen the last of Rachel Shenton’s Debbie, who Petsch’s Maya talks to on FaceTime, along with many of the townspeople from the diner scene.
3. Petsch was terrified of the project due to her love of the original film.
The shadow of the original Strangers looms large over Chapter 1. Petsch is “such a fan” that she was hesitant about doing a new version:
“I was terrified to touch that property. I think it’s an incredibly perfect horror film. I’ve seen so many horror films, and I feel like it’s one of the only ones that’s truly scared me to my bones, that I still think about all the time. So as we were trying to expound upon that story, with the second and third movies, we had to naturally repel the first story.”
Solomon similarly thinks highly of the original:
“I love the original Strangers. I wasn’t as big a fan of the sequel [2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night], because it was just another story in a trailer park with the Strangers. I didn’t love that two of the Strangers got killed. That was just me personally; there are people that liked it. I was like, ‘I’d like to do something more interesting.’ In order to do it, to find that balance of retelling what made the first one so great as the basis to be able to launch off and tell the rest of the story.”
Petsch adds, “As we know, at the end of the first one, one of the last shots is Liv [Tyler]’s eyes opening. I’ve always wondered what happens after that.”
4. The killers’ hair is concealed to hide their identity.
Although the filmmakers opted to keep the look of the titular Strangers true to the original, Dollface and Pin-Up Girl’s hair is now concealed. This was a “purposeful change” to hide their identities, which will presumably be revealed later in the trilogy.
“We had a specific reason for doing it, obviously, because you do end up meeting a bunch of the folk from this small town,” explains Solomon. “You don’t know who’s wearing the mask, so if we had given up the hair that would make that identification a little bit easier.”
5. Petsch conceived the shower scene based on a personal fear.
In addition to starring in all three films, Petsch is an exclusive producer on the trilogy. More than a mere vanity credit, she had creative input throughout the stages of production, including the addition of Chapter 1‘s shower scene.
“This was not in the original script, the shower. Maybe our first week we were talking about what would be the scariest thing for me if I was in a situation like this,” she recalls. “I shared with you that every time I take a shower and I’m at the point where there’s suds of soap in my eyes and I’m shampooing, I’m always sure that’s when the serial killer’s gonna walk in. So we wrote this in, because I think that must be a common experience.”
6. Remaking the original film was a conscious decision to kick off the trilogy.
It’s not until the end titles that the pair directly address the thought process behind launching the reboot trilogy with a retread of the original.
“Some people may go and watch this and go, ‘Oh, my god. It was a remake of the original.’ But actually this is just act one of our giant movie! If you watched it as a whole, then you’d be like, ‘Oh, shit. That’s just where it started,” says Solomon. “This is the 90-minute setup of the entire thing.”
Petsch concurs, “Don’t get me wrong. I also feel like the original is so good that it would be crazy to just do a remake of the original, but in order to tell the story that we were trying to tell, you kind of have to go back and do a repurposing of that story with these two new characters.”
“They did the whole first movie, the original, amazing, but that’s the jumping off point. This entire giant movie that’s become three chapters was done with a lot of love,” Solomon concludes.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is available now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
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