Vinegar Syndrome's limited edition Blu-ray boxed set AMITYVILLE: THE CURSED COLLECTION proves that America's most haunted property still has buyers.

After AMITYVILLE 3D, hapless families finally took the hint not to buy a cheap house built over an Indian burial ground where a mass murder occurred; however, no one can pass up a bargain, and author John G. Jones gave readers "Amityville: The Evil Escapes" an anthology of short stories in which buyers of objects from the house in a yard sale take the evil home with them. Former New World Pictures President of Production Steve White (CABIN BOY) and partner Barry Bernardi (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) could not pass up a deal either and bought the rights to the book cheaply and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR screenwriter Sandor Stern took the basic concept and scripted AMITYVILLE: THE EVIL ESCAPES as a television movie for NBC in 1989 in which a six priest exorcism of the house – lead by Father Manfred (Norman Lloyd, SPELLBOUND) – causes the evil to escape through the electrical outlets into a strangely humanoid-looking lamp which is bought in a yard sale by Helen Royce (DAYS OF OUR LIVES' Peggy McCay) and sent across the country as a macabre gift to her sister Alice Leacock (FATHER KNOWS BEST's Jane Wyatt) whose house is about to be invaded by her recently-widowed daughter Nancy (SHE WAITS' Patty Duke) and her children Amanda (Zoe Trilling, TOBE HOOPER'S NIGHT TERRORS), Brian (Aron Eisenberg, PLAYROOM), and young Jessica (Brandy Gold, WILDCATS). Jessica still has not gotten over her father's sudden death and is drawn to the strange lamp which the others find ugly, and Nancy goes from overhearing her daughter carrying on conversations with it to having her own hallucinations of her late husband's apparition. The lamp causes the household electronics and plumbing to go haywire sewing suspicion and resentment between Alice, her daughter, and her grandchildren. Father Kibble (Fredric Lehne, ORDINARY PEOPLE), who witnessed the evil escape into the lamp, discovers that Helen has died of a severe strain of tetanus after cutting her finger on the lamp and traces it to California where he hopes to keep it from its ultimate goal of possessing the weakest member of the family.

A big event when it premiered on NBC, AMITYVILLE: THE EVIL ESCAPES falls short of some of the other made-for-TV haunted house movies of the period like HAUNTED and GRAVE SECRETS which also featured Duke. The lamp is a striking creation and the new house also has some atmosphere, but television standards and practices mostly reins in the film's violent and scary content. While I have never found Wyatt particularly believable, even in her classic film and TV roles, here her mannerly delivery and coolness suit the character who is called out for her standoffishness towards her own grandchildren and believably transforms into a "tough old lady" during the climax. The film was edited by Skip Schoolnik (HALLOWEEN II) who had made his directorial debut with the slasher HIDE AND GO SHRIEK the previous year and would go on to a prolific career as a television producer with series like ANGEL, THE WALKING DEAD, and SALEM. Author Jones is credited as associate producer.

In AMITYVILLE 1992: IT'S ABOUT TIME, Jacob Sterling (Stephen Macht, THE MONSTER SQUAD) is an architect who returns from breaking ground on a development on the East Coast to Burlwood, California, where he lives in one of the luxury units of his previous tract housing project, with a gift for his family – troubled son Rusty (Damon Martin, GHOULIES II) and awkward daughter Lisa (DARK SKIES' Megan Ward) who were being babysat by his ex-girlfriend Andrea (Shawn Weatherly, SHADOWZONE) – in the form of a hideous antique clock which at night drills itself into the walls of the house and quickly demonstrates its ability to manipulate time by transforming the living room into a much older room before Rusty's eyes. Far from frightened, Rusty and his occultist neighbor Iris (Nita Talbot, FRIGHTMARE) are intrigued and look into the history of the clock. After Jacob is attacked and has a chunk taken out of his thigh by a neighbor's dog which suddenly turns vicious, he becomes obsessed with developing a timeless new look for the houses on the East Coast lot and Iris discovers a picture that reveals that the clock once sat on the mantle in the Amityville murder house and where it had been before that was even worse. People who try to warn the family meet with freak accidents while Rusty loses time inside the house, Lisa goes from awkward to seductive and murderous, Jacob goes full psychopath, and Andrea's psychiatrist new boyfriend Leonard (Jonathan Penner, LET THE DEVIL WEAR BLACK) reaches farther for logical explanations than the shrink in POLTERGEIST III.

Helmed by Tony Randel early on in his direct-to-video period after leaving New World Pictures where he had served as an editor and made his directorial debut with HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II, AMITYVILLE 1992: IT'S ABOUT TIME is an improvement over the previous film with its combination of Gothic elements in bland suburbia where a housing development does not foster community but rather isolates families from their closest neighbors – Dick Miller makes a cameo as a neighbor in a dispute with Jacob about hedge height – and busybodies are ready to point fingers when something out of the ordinary happens. The clock is an attractive prop and the concept of its manipulation of time is interesting even if it really does not tie in with anything else. The film drops the theories about the haunting from the earlier entries, bringing in the legend of serial murderer and "Bluebeard" influence Gilles de Rais to little effect. As irritating as the Leonard character is, his armchair psychoanalysis of a family he barely knows does not of course explain their current behavior but it does suggest why it is so easy for an outside malevolent influence to attack them. KNB's make-up effects look particularly rubbery throughout, a fact not helped by the cinematography of Christopher Taylor (EVERY BREATH) which is at its best in darker scenes with blue gels and gobo shadows but looking otherwise flat, while the visual effects of the usually top-notch Peter Kuran (BEETLEJUICE) suffer from budgetary restraints. The melodic scoring of Daniel Licht (BAD MOON) cannot help but draw comparisons to Christopher Young's HELLRAISER scores even if the orchestration is never a lush.

AMITYVILLE: A NEW GENERATION gets away from the suburban setting, choosing instead a not yet gentrified downtown Los Angeles where modern artists have formed a colony in a warehouse of loft apartments owned by Dick (David Naughton, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON) and Jane (Barbara Howard, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER). Needing money to pay the rent, photographer Keyes (STRANGER THINGS' Ross Partridge), painter Suki (Julia Nickson-Soul, GLITCH!), and sculptor Paulie (Richard Roundtree, SHAFT) try to convince Dick to let them use the living space for a show. Paulie has an anarchic sculpture in mind, but Suki is unsure what to paint – and is also distracted by relationship strife with boyfriend Ray (Robert Rusler, VAMP) – and Keyes who favored still life and landscape suddenly develops an interest in people when he catches a homeless man (Jack Orend, THE BLUES BROTHERS) following him around town. He takes the man's photograph and pays him in return, and the man insists he take an ornate mirror that he claims to be a family heirloom as a gift. Suki is drawn to the mirror and puts it in her space, and it exerts its evil influence on Ray and kills him in a manner that Detective Clark (Terry O'Quinn, THE STEPFATHER) rules to be a drunken accident; whereupon Suki is inspired to paint her inner demons, the paintings of which she animates with a pulley system attached to a noose (guess where this is going). Keyes starts having recurring nightmares from his childhood of a man gunning down his family. After the homeless man turns up dead, Keyes still claims not to know who he is but arranges to pay for a proper burial. When a clerical error ends up with the headstone identifying the man as Keyes' "beloved father," Keyes – with Clark's help and the support of girlfriend Llanie (Lala Sloatman, PUMP UP THE VOLUME) – looks into the man's murderous past and his own connection to it. Meanwhile, the mirror continues to turn the creative passions of those who gaze into it to murderous ends.

The attempt to get the furthest away from the formula (but not really), AMITYVILLE: A NEW GENERATION is probably the best of the series if only because its differences are novel, from the downtown Los Angeles as Soho-like artists' colony to the mirror which causes characters to externalize their inner demons which then consume them. Partridge is one of the better leads, with his character's sudden interest in people after establishing his use of humor to deflect anything too personal leading to interesting character development and a compelling performance. Nickson-Soul and Naughton are also good in their supporting bits while O'Quinn has already here slipped into his post-THE STEPFATHER genre character actor stage of his career while Lin Shaye had already done a handful of genre products but would not enter that stage of her career until INSIDIOUS and beyond. The film is the best-looking in set thanks to the photography of Wally Pfister who had been paying his dues in the nineties mainly in erotic thrillers adult filmmaker Gregory Dark was directing around the period under the name A. Gregory Hippolyte like ANIMAL INSTINCTS, SECRET GAMES, and MIRROR IMAGES. Licht is back as composer and seems to have been influenced by then-popular group Enigma's melding of techno and Gregorian chant. Director John Murlowski is probably better known for his obscure slasher debut RETURN OF THE FAMILY MAN than for the twenty-odd direct-to-video films he has made since.

The last of the second cycle of films, AMITYVILLE DOLLHOUSE finally comes home when architect Bill Martin (Robin Thomas, ABOUT LAST NIGHT) builds a new house on the burnt-out remains of the Amityville house, centering around the fireplace and chimney that survived the blaze. He seems to be the only one excited about the move in his blended family of teenage son Todd (Allen Cutler, CROSSCUT), young daughter Jessica (Rachel Duncan, RUMPLESTILTSKIN), new wife Claire (Starr Andreeff, DANCE OF THE DAMNED), and nerdy stepson Jimmy (Jarrett Lennon, SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT). Breaking into a nearby old shed on the property, Bill discovers an ornate and very familiar-looking dollhouse, which is fortunate when his truck takes on a mind of its own and crushes the bicycle he has purchased for Jessica's birthday. Jessica loves the dollhouse but Bill's New Agey sister Marla (Lenore Kasdorf, MISSING IN ACTION) and her occultist husband Tobias (Franc Ross) get bad vibes from it. Jessica soon becomes afraid of the dollhouse as it has the power to influence thing within the family's home, while a rapidly decaying apparition of Jimmy's late father (Clayton Murray) tries to convince him that Bill wants to take his mother away and that the boy will have to stop him, Claire is compelled to sexual feelings for her stepson, and Todd's girlfriend Dana (THAT 70S SHOW's Lisa Robyn Kelly) meets with a freak accident while getting warm and toasty near the living room fireplace. Bill's own long-suppressed gift of premonition reasserts itself in the form of dreams that combine the events of the previous house's blaze with mounting sense of danger for his family.

Coming three years after AMITYVILLE: A NEW GENERATION with producer Steve White making his directing debut for different producers, AMITYVILLE DOLLHOUSE is a hodgepodge of concepts – is the titular dollhouse the portal for the evil force or the surviving fireplace – with demons, voodoo dolls, zombies, demons, insects, and the same old psychological deterioration of an already fractured family. Performances range from fair to competent, with Lennon initially as irritating as his weedy character until Jimmy not only questions what his father is demanding of him but also realizing that he is being bullied. The family drama seems more obligatory than compelling while the make-up effects work of Ron Knyrim's Sota FX ranges from rubbery to effective (particularly with regard to "dead dad"). Slipping back into the formula after A NEW GENERATION, DOLLHOUSE just seems to be marking time and checking off concepts with only the handsome photography of low budget genre great Tom Calloway (DEMON WIND) to recommend. Despite the house ostensibly having been erected over the site of the Amityville house, the hilly land around it looks less like upstate New York and more like Southern California.

AMITYVILLE: THE EVIL ESCAPES premiered on television in May 1989 and turned up on videotape and laserdisc in 1992 with an R-rating and some instances of additional violence and gore – notably an accident involving a garbage disposal and a teenage boy (director Stern's son Jamie, PIN) – and it was this version that went to video and theatrical release in overseas territories, as well as Sterling Entertainment's fullscreen 2007 DVD. Mastered from a 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative with the title AMITYVILLE HORROR: THE EVIL ESCAPES, the film's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray looks as best as this blandly-photographed and overlit film can, while the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track does what it can with an unambitious stereo mix. Optional English SDH subtitles are included and include one blunder where a character early on says "Satan" and it is transcribed as "Cigna."

In “The Return to Amityville" (14:51), Stern discuses adapting the original film from Jay Anson's novel, adapting the Jones book with respect to television standards and the budget, scouting locations – the owner of the Leacock house exterior would not allow them to film inside and was wary of letting them film at all because another production had trampled her rose bushes (and that film's producer was Bernardi) – and being unaware about the additional violence for the R-rated version. He also discusses the family nature of the production with not only his son Jamie acting but also his wife Kandy (THE PRESIDIO) as production designer – who erected a false flat of the Amityville house in front of another property – and his other sons Mark and Shawn as art director and post-production assistant respectively. “Televised Terror" (14:28) is an interview with cinematographer Tom Richmond who notes that his previous horror credits include HARD ROCK ZOMBIES and CHOPPING MALL, being unused to professional film production in which the operator was separate from the cinematographer, the lighting challenges of the interiors with their bright walls and not having control of the colors chosen for the wardrobe which he believed clashed within the shots.

Released to VHS and laserdisc by Republic Pictures, AMITYVILLE 1992: IT'S ABOUT TIME also made the rounds on television before getting the requisite fullscreen, barebones DVD release in 2005 from Lionsgate. Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray from a 4K scan of the original camera shows off the deliberately unpleasant interiors to better effect than the rubbery prosthetics. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo mix is a bit more ambitious with ticking, pendulum swinging, and turning gearworks occasionally creeping into the background of scenes to remind us of the influence of the clock. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

“Time Pieces" (13:30) is an interview with Randel who discusses approaching the film as a standalone work than as a sequel, knowing producer White at New World, and redeveloping the script with the theme of how we tend to repeat patterns in our life. He also reveals that he met cinematographer Taylor through Denise Di Novi who had been an executive VP at New World before going on to produce the likes of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and BATMAN RETURNS, and that he could no longer afford the likes of Christopher Young (HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II) for the score but the composer recommended Licht (who would later score HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE). “Clockwork" (7:29) is an interview with the co-writer/producer Christopher DeFaria (GRAVITY) who had pitched a number of projects to White before offering to script one of the Amityville films (he would also script the next entry A NEW GENERATION), being on the set as producer and recalling that the bathtub fell through the floor after they let it overflow for several takes, and how some of the bits involving lost time required crew to move props and furnishings around just off camera.

Released on VHS and laserdisc by Republic Pictures and on fullscreen DVD by Lionsgate, AMITYVILLE: A NEW GENERATION gains gloss in the 4K scan of the original camera negative, with the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen looking crisp, sharp, and contrasty where the older transfer looked a bit hazy with grayish blacks in the more moodily lit scenes. Detail in facial features, clothing, and hair also does favors for the make-up effects with one zombified character providing a jolt. The handsome cinematography fares best her of the set while the more interesting stereo surround mix here is well-served by the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 encode. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided.

A NEW GENERATION is the only film in the set with an audio commentary, this one with director Murlowski and moderated by Elijah Drenner. Murlowski reveals that much of the film's casting had actors whose dispositions matched their characters from Rusler's alpha male aggressiveness to Naughton's comic moral ambiguity. He also discusses the film's theme of a pseudo-family in contrast to the usual Amityville series families, and his feelings now about the pacing in light of how his style has developed. Murlowski also appears in the interview “Through the Looking Glass" (13:08) which is not redundant in that it is illustrated throughout with video shot by him on the set that most interestingly shows how they achieved the mirror effects entirely on the set with the help of old school effects supervisor William Cruse who had worked on the first Amityville film. “Malevolent Reflections" (4:32) is another interview with DeFaria who notes how the sales of 1992 led Republic to request another sequel, getting way from the suburban and family settings, and the contributions of cinematographer Pfister.

Once again released to tape and laserdisc by Republic Pictures and barebones fullscreen DVD by Lionsgate, AMITYVILLE DOLLHOUSE also comes to 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray from a 4K scan of the original camera negative which serves Callaway's photography nicely and the prosthetics thanks to his lighting. The macro shots of the dollhouse interiors show the amount of craftsmanship that went into the prop but the enhanced resolution does not do much for the demons during the climax. No complaints about the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track of an uninteresting Dolby Stereo mix. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided.