This film essentially begins with a woman by the name of "Mrs. Pangborn" (Sheri Lee) presenting a birthday cake to her teenage son and daughter. While she's doing this, her husband "Senator Ty Pangborn" (Dan Mauro) comes downstairs dressed in a clown costume and proceeds to murder all three of them with a shotgun before taking his own life. The scene then shifts to a week later with two young men and a woman breaking into the house and attempting to steal a picture of a clown which was supposedly taken from the original haunted house in Amityville. While trying to do so, however, a clown materializes and murders them all. After that, the scene then shifts once again to a man by the name of "Ben" (Ben Gothier) buying a toy monkey at a small shop and taking it home. But what neither Ben nor his wife "Michelle" (Michelle Muir-Lewis) realize is that this toy monkey was also taken from the same haunted house in Amityville, and it is possessed by an evil spirit which intends to kill both of them. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that the director (Dustin Ferguson) borrowed heavily from his earlier film "Amityville Toybox" produced about a year earlier. To that effect, not only did he feature the same toy monkey, but he also replayed several scenes from that earlier picture as well. Talk about a complete lack of imagination. Yet as dull as the plot turned out to be, the main problem with this movie concerned the extremely poor audio technique. More specifically, at times the audio was so low that it was difficult to hear what the characters were saying. At other times, the background music drowned out the dialogue completely. Not that it really mattered because there really wasn't anything here to arouse that much interest anyway. Be that as it may, although I very seldom give a film the lowest mark possible, I have to say that this particular movie is a rare exception to that rule--it's just that bad.
Review of Amityville Clownhouse
