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.” Eric Roberts appears early on in Shawn C. Phillips’ Amityville Bigfoot. He turns up at the derelict cabin that is purportedly a laboratory for Amityville Chemical and […]
![Even Eric Roberts Can’t Save ‘Amityville Bigfoot’ [The Amityville IP]](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amityville-Bigfoot-2024.jpg)
That’s not simply because the film is content to poke fun at the Amityville “franchise” or even Phillips himself (one of the final lines is a character acknowledging that “Shawn C Phillips would make a movie like that…He has zero shame”). In fact, if the film had leaned more into self-aware humor like Amityville Christmas Vacation and Amityville Vibrator or more recent entries like The Last Amityville Film and Amityville Ripper, some of this might have been less insufferable.
It’s the glimmers of possibility – an effective joke or a solid practical effect – that makes Amityville Bigfoot so aggravating to watch. At select points, I found myself bemoaning, “if only the rest of the film were like this”; alas those moments are brief and fleeting and then the film returns to its juvenile frat-boy jokes, one dimensional characters (who come and go at a moment’s notice) and the flimsiest of bare bone plots.
The plot, as it were, concerns Amityville Chemical, which is conducting some kind of test on a captured Bigfoot. Researcher Ian (Phillips) is in equal parts lust and competition with co-worker Annie (Amityville Karen’s Lauren Francesca). She is uninterested in Ian, however, because she is secretly part of an animal activist group seeking to liberate Bigfoot, and also because she is in love with the creature.
After co-worker Gregory (Kyle Clarington) allows Bigfoot to escape, boss Simon (David Perry) calls in company boss Dominic before disappearing from the narrative. This happens frequently: characters appear and then immediately disappear or are killed, with little or no bearing on the plot or other characters.
It’s almost as though Phillips had a rotating roster of friends with limited availability, so he just shot random footage at different times with different groups. The result is an overstuffed and underdeveloped collection of actors without relationship to one another, including a group of unhoused people stealing food from a Bigfoot film, a trio of men (and one of their wives) searching for a nudist colony, a YouTuber named Raptor Rich and Waylon (Jake Pearlman), who was recently in a mental institution.
This random assortment of characters would be more tolerable if they were, you know, actual characters. Or if the dialogue weren’t simply a garbled collection of non-sensical statements that plays like bad improv. Or if there was anything resembling conventional plot mechanics, like rising action or even a climax.
So while there are brief glimmers of comedy that works, and some of the deaths are surprisingly effective, these tolerable moments are few and far between. The end result is a long, boring slog of a film; Phillips isn’t just phoning this in, Amityville Bigfoot plays like a filmmaker that doesn’t even care anymore. And it shows.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
Next time: we’re not done with Julie Anne Prescott just yet because she’s also the co-writer of Amityville Turkey Day (2024), the sequel to Amityville Thanksgiving.
