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.”

I feel lied to.

While yes, technically Eric Roberts is in 2015’s Amityville Death House, he’s basically hidden under a mask and appears solo for his whole one minute of screen time (Clearly this cameo was filmed separately from the rest of the production and took approximately one hour to complete).

Barring the slightly misleading advertising, the twelfth Amityville film remains weirdly entertaining. It’s not good at all, but there’s something admirable about its “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” approach to storytelling, which helps to offset the truly terrible acting. Because let’s be real: you can forgive amateur actors if there’s a spider woman in your film’s climax.

Death House marks the first of four Amityville films we’ll discuss from director Mark Polonia, so it’s mildly reassuring that this isn’t a complete misfire. John Oak Dalton’s script is at least partially to thank for that, seeing that it basically takes the mad libs approach: take a handful of unconnected words – say: spider, Hurricane, grandma, bones, drowning, warlock, ice fishing, dog – and spin it into something bonkers.

The film begins with a completely arbitrary bracketing device as Sheriff Steve McGrath (Ken Van Sant) watches recovered video footage of a group of College students returning from a successful philanthropy mission helping Hurricane survivors in Florida. It’s telling that none of these details matter; it’s merely an excuse for the film to jump back 24 hours to when the footage was filmed, moments before protagonist Tiffany Raymond (Krysten St. Pierre) and her friends, Dig (Houston Baker), Aric (Michael Merchant) and Bree (Cassandra Hayes) arrive at the home of Tiffany’s Grandma Florence (Yolie Cannales).

The Wilmont house has the infamous cat eye windows, but aside from that and a slight connection (once again) to the Salem witch trials, Amityville Death House doesn’t establish any ties to the DeFeos or the other films in the series.

In reality, the film is a standard witch/warlock film: three hundred years ago Abigail Wilmont relocated from Salem to Amityville, where she was hanged for practicing witchcraft. Multiple reports suggest that, in life, Abigail was a white witch. For some reason, however, Roberts’ evil Warlock seems content to sacrifice six people to resurrect her. In the interim, the witch uses Grandma Flo’s body are a temporary vessel so she can commit murder and set up a dramatic confrontation with her granddaughter in the climax.

The actual execution of this is far less streamlined, however. The six sacrifices each have ties to descendants of the men who lynched Abigail, but for narrative purposes, they’re just Red Shirts who are introduced and immediately killed off in a bland fashion. One wishes that Polonia (who also appears as Deputy Sully and acts as producer and editor) had shot more coverage of the murder sequences so that they didn’t need to be edited down into flashing epileptic bursts.

By comparison, Tiffany’s dreams/hallucinations of Abigail’s lynching have an old-timey sepia-tone and herky-jerky editing style that makes them more visually palatable and create a real sense of mood. Budget is clearly an issue, but erring on the side of bad green screen and music video editing doesn’t make the murder sequences more exciting.

Thankfully the scenes with the College kids are more entertaining, if only because the character beats are far more bizarre. Not only do Aric and Dig become possessed out of the blue and drown Bree in a barrel of sludge-y black water, but in the climax Tiffany turns out to be a latent witch.

This is hardly surprising, though the visual is a full WTF moment: during a scuffle, Tiffany’s shirt is ripped open and she’s revealed to have six breasts. Never mind the fact that this has not been alluded to in the script and therefore seems to come out of nowhere; the very idea that Tiffany has somehow hidden this condition her entire life and none of her friends knew is hilariously baffling. It also leads to the single best zinger of the film, when Aric exclaims “she has the witches’ teats!” (I…what?!)

It’s wild. And it’s succeeded by Bree’s possession by Abigail, which randomly transforms her into a human/spider hybrid (obviously it’s just Hayes doing a back bend with unconvincing CGI legs).

While this would have been even more exciting had the surprise not been spoiled by the poster art, these are the kinds of gonzo, outrageous nonsensical developments that make Amityville films worth watching, even when (especially when?) they don’t make a lick of sense (Again: spiders were literally never mentioned before).

All this to say: bad acting and shoddy plotting are forgivable so long as the film is silly, fun, and/or entertaining.

Is Amityville Death House a bad film? Yes, absolutely.

Was it an amusing 69 minute diversion? Also yes.

The Amityville IP Awards go to…

• Best Moment: Tie – the spider transformation is arguably the film’s biggest WTF moment, but the teat reveal is legitimately baffling and oh so funny.
• Best Performance: While the acting is uniformly bad across the board, credit St. Pierre for trying to sell not only her character’s ridiculous physical reveal, but also attempting to ground the emotional beats of the story between Tiffany and her grandmother.
• Worst Make-Up: The oatmeal slathered on Grandma Florence’s face when she’s possessed by Abigail is reminiscent of Fear No Evil, which is to say that it is horribly unconvincing, to the point of distraction. The six teats breast plate is a close runner up, but at least that’s funny.

Next Time: We’re staying in 2015 to look at the delayed 2013 production of Amityville Playhouse (2015), also known as The Amityville Theater.