Marvin and Debbie (David Stein, Dawna Wightman) buy the Amityville house. They are unaware of its past, having lived on the moon for the last decade. They bring some friends over to help renovate. Of course, bad stuff starts to go down. The fifth Amityville is a dreadful Canadian-produced direct-to-video movie that is quite possibly the worst in the series. It has little to do with the previous films. The entire thing looks cheap like it was filmed for fifty Canadian pesos. Dark, dreary mess with pathetic special effects, no scares, and a transparent story. Avoid unless you are desperate to complete the series.

THE AMITYVILLE CURSE is a junk addition to the AMITYVILLE HORROR franchise. It's an entirely forgettable production that looks and feels like any old low budget haunted house flick as there's no real connection to the other films in this series. What we have is a very typical horror film in which a group of friends move into a dilapidated old house in order to renovate it but instead find themselves menaced and then possessed by a gang of spooks.

By all accounts this was an early straight-to-video film and that shows in its level of ineptitude. Absolutely nothing happens in this production that we haven't seen done better in other horror films and the various scare scenes are a joke. The direction is probably the worst thing about this, as he chooses to shoot most of his scenes in the dark so that the viewer is straining to see what's going on. The only familiar member of the cast for me was the lead, Kim Coates, who's gone on to appear in the likes of BLACK HAWK DOWN, but like the rest of the actors he gives an entirely undistinguished performance.

Austrian-born ghost hunter Professor Dr. Hans Holzer wrote the book Murder In Amityville that the incredibly salacious and totally awesome Amityville II: The Possession was based on. Eight years later, The Amityville Curse was made, based on another of his books. Holzer wrore a hundred plus books, so people really need to get on making more movies based on his crazy ideas.

This was directed by Tom Berry, who is mainly is known as a producer, helping make movies like Scanners II: The New Order, The Paperboy and Screamers. If you rented movies in the 1990's, you probably picked up a movie that he touched from far away in the Great White North.

Marvin and Debbie bought the house next to the Amityville house because, well, we wouldn't have a movie if they didn't. It's possessed because there's a tunnel that connects the houses. And also, yes, if it wasn't possessed I probably wouldn't be watching this movie.

They bring up some of their friends to help get it back in shape, like Frank (Kim Coates, Carlo from Battlefield Earth),Abigail (Cassandra Gava, the witch who tries to seduce Arnold in Conan the Barbarian) and Bill.

Frank ends up possessed and kills just about everyone but the ladies. He also wipes out Mrs. Moriarty, the former housekeeper. And there's also a story of a priest who died here when the house was once a rectory. This doesn't reach the absurd heights of some of the other Amityville films, but it does have a dude getting shot with a nailgun, so there's that.