Main cast: Scott C Roe (Sgt Thomas Dash), Tank Jones (Lt Howie Stevenson), Alysha Young (Gerri Tarver), Michael Ferguson (Det Lance McQueen), Micah Fitzgerald, Kelly Lynn Reiter (Officer Nina Rossi), Troy Fromin (Officer Malloy), Joycelyne Lew (Mrs Chen), Barry Papick (Dr Ira), Michael Cervantes (Sam Cooper), Kole Benfield (Jimmy Dash), Ruben Sholinyan, and Bryan Clark (Childs)
Director: Thomas J Churchill
When I see “Amityville”, I assume this is about a haunted house, but it turns out that Amityville Uprising is the third movie in a trilogy set in a place called, yes, Amityville. Assuming that those two other movies are of the same quality as this one, I count myself fortunate to have never stumbled upon them.
This movie is about some cops and locals trapped in an office clumsily disguised to be a police station, complete with hilariously fake screens as “walls” at times. They are trapped because an explosion at a nearby laboratory causes acid rain to fall onto that place, melting the locals caught in the rain. Or rather, it causes this bald guy to shriek under someone hosing drops of water all over him, as the lighting takes on a reddish hue to symbolize that he is burning up and melting… at least in a figurative sense, I guess, as the guy looks perfectly fine to me. Some of these dead sods turn into zombies, because hey, why not.
The fun starts nearly at the 50-minute mark of this 85-minute episode, however. No, I am not kidding, although I wish I am. Just like every low budget film in the past that tried to mask its financial limitations, this one has the bright idea of filling up screen time with the main characters just talking about mundane and boring stuff.
The first 50 minutes are mostly just really bad actors clumsily uttering out lines in the flattest manner possible, without any convincing human emotion. The worst of the lot is Joycelyne Lew, who plays this Karen character by over-enunciating every word she has to utter in the most wooden manner possible, often placing emphasis on the wrong syllables. She sounds like a badly-programmed AI of a GPS, and her acting is pure android realness.
Worse, the human drama is of the most cliché kind, especially the tedious father and rebellious son drama that the people behind this film believe will the heart and soul of the movie. Yes, well, not with a cast of this questionable acting caliber.
What few zombie moments that are present here are pretty average, nothing to really scream about, so ultimately, the biggest tragedy of this film is how it blew away what little money it has on moments that aren’t even halfway decent.
Why even make this movie in the first place, if the folks involved were just going to round up “actors” that seem to be talking English and moving on a film set like it was their first time doing so, and the script itself is just a million times worse version of things that had already been done to death in a much better manner too?
Perhaps this movie is just a means for organized crime people or politicians (what’s the difference anyway) to launder money, I don’t know, but I do know this one is simply to flee with extreme prejudice from, should one come across it on a streaming service.
