The Amityville Asylum (2013) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: Andrew Jones
STARRING: Eileen Daly, Judith Haley, Lee Bane
RATED: UR/Region: O/1:85/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1 (BD-r)
AVAILABLE FROM Acid Leomark Studios
If there’s one thing the horror genre has taught us, it’s that absolutely anything can become an Amityville movie. Houses, dolls, clocks, toilets, air fryers—give it enough time and somebody will slap “Amityville” on it. The Amityville Asylum arrived relatively early in the franchise’s descent into keyword-fueled madness, back when filmmakers were still pretending these movies had some connection to the original story.
Directed by Andrew Jones and starring Sophia Del Pizzo, the film takes viewers back to the psychiatric hospital that supposedly stood on the site before the infamous Amityville house was built. It’s a premise that sounds like it should produce at least a little creepy fun. Evil asylum? Ghosts? Amityville branding? That’s usually enough to get me to press play.
Unfortunately, The Amityville Asylum suffers from the same problem that would later plague many of Andrew Jones’ infamous Robert the Doll movies.
It takes itself way too seriously.
Jones has become something of a cult figure among low-budget horror fans, depending on whether you mean “cult figure” as a compliment or a warning label. His films often have decent ideas and respectable production values for their budgets, but they frequently approach material that should be fun with the intensity of a historical drama. The Amityville Asylum is no exception.
The movie desperately wants to be a slow-burn psychological horror film. The problem is that it burns so slowly that there are stretches where you start wondering if the movie forgot it was supposed to be horror. Characters wander around dimly lit hallways. People stare into the distance. Conversations happen. More hallways are explored. Then, just when something interesting threatens to occur, the film settles back down for another round of atmospheric brooding.
Atmosphere is great. I love atmosphere. But eventually atmosphere needs to invite something else to the party.
To be fair, the film doesn’t look terrible. The asylum setting provides some creepy visuals, the cinematography is respectable, and Sophia Del Pizzo does what she can with the material she’s given. Nobody appears embarrassed to be there, which is more than can be said for some low-budget horror productions. The cast plays everything completely straight.
That seriousness, however, becomes a major problem. A movie called The Amityville Asylum should either be genuinely terrifying or gloriously ridiculous. This somehow lands in the awkward middle where it’s too self-important to be fun and not scary enough to justify the solemn tone. The result is a film that feels much longer than its actual runtime.
The scares are sparse, the pacing drags, and much of the movie feels like it’s waiting for something significant to happen. Unfortunately, when the payoff finally arrives, it’s rarely worth the wait. The film keeps building toward moments that never quite deliver the impact they’re aiming for.
What’s frustrating is that there are pieces of a decent movie here. The setting works. The concept has potential. The production is competent. But competence alone doesn’t create excitement. Horror needs tension, energy, memorable scares, or at the very least some entertaining insanity. The Amityville Asylum offers only small doses of each.
In the end, this isn’t an aggressively bad movie. It’s almost worse: it’s a dull one. The film spends so much time trying to convince you how serious and important it is that it forgets to be entertaining. Fans of Andrew Jones’ later Robert the Doll films will probably recognize the formula immediately. Long stretches of gloomy atmosphere, earnest performances, and a level of self-importance that the material simply can’t support.
Some horror movies make you jump. Some make you laugh. The Amityville Asylum mostly made me check how much time was left.
