This is a great horror film it has a great story line. It also has great acting. It also great special effects. The first 4 Amityville movie are very scary. This is the fifth one and it is better. I do not know why the got a 2.8. That is underrating it. I give 10 out of 10. It is a great horror film. Amityville dollhouse is better. But still this is a very scary movie. See it. It is one of the scariest movies from 1990. If you do not get scared then no movie will scary you. This is one of the scariest movie of all time. It is a must see. It is very scary. I need more lines and I am running out of things to say. Great movie great movie great movie. See it.

This straight-to-video effort has somewhat of a terrible reputation, especially compared to the rest of the series. I haven't seen any of the other films to follow it, but the ones before; the theatrical releases (1, 2 & 3) and straight-to-TV (4) production were much better for entertainment. Were as the previous entry "The Evil Escapes" didn't feature the haunted house; "The Amityville Curse" goes go back to the earlier films formula, although the house has taken on a different transformation and the visual impact of that is less imposing. But that wasn't the main issue. This goes to the storytelling (which this plot has nothing do with the actual Amityville curse), pacing and performances. Especially the acting. David Stain and Dawna Wightman simply aggravate as the obnoxious leads, one being pompous and the other simply whining. An unbearable combination. Helen Hughes gives the usual batty old lady shtick. Then there are static turns by Kim Coates and Cassandra Cava. Only Anthony Dean Rubes showed any sort of spark. Father Parcaecus is brutally murdered in his own confessional by a mysterious assailant. After the murder, the church is closed and the belongings along with the confessional are sealed in a small room in the basement of Parcaecus' house. Years have passed when Debbie and Marvin come across the vacant house and decide to purchase it for their investment club. They invite a couple of friends up to help renovate the old house, but this weekend turns out be a nightmare with a wave of supernatural events occurring. Bog-standard shenanigans (disappearing ghostly figures) populate mostly an uneventful and tedious haunted house story spending plenty of time on filler (house in need of repairs) and non-existent chills. The story is uninteresting, plods and the final revelation you can see coming miles away. The stale script is terrible. It throws many different and hysterical ideas about, but never convincingly gels them together and leaves things rather unfulfilled. Like Debbie's baffling connection to the house. Loose and lazy work with mystery plot ties. Technically speaking it's solid, but mechanically tired and flat in its execution. Not much in the way of bumps in the night. The "Curse" is a real snooze. "Things are usually cheap for a reason."

I wish I could give it negative stars. If you are a fan of The Amityville series, or just movies in general, do not waste your time on this. You will be horribly disappointed. The plot and characters are poorly written., The writers obviously thought that riding the Amityville coat tales would be enough for a semi successful movie. They could not have been more wrong. This movie goes nowhere. It was like watching a poorly written sitcom: weak ploy, weak acting, It is not to often than one comes across a movie this horrible. I tried watching just hoping it would get better but I could not get through 20 minutes before shutting it off.

"The Amityville Curse" is a less-than-spectacular entry in the series.**SPOILERS**Years after a brutal murder, Marvin, (David Stein) his wife Abigail, (Cassandra Gava) and Bill, (Anthony Dean Rubes) help friends Frank, (Kim Coates) and his wife Debbie, (Dawna Wightman) move into a new house in Amityville, New York. Waiting with them until the furniture arrives, they decide to spend the night as a house-warming gesture, and immediately start to experience strange events around the house. As the night wears on, she becomes even more convinced that something is going on in the house but no one is willing to take her seriously. As the events in the house soon reach more extreme behavior, they eventually learn that one of the previous inhabitants of the house had gone mad listening to voices that emanated from the house, and had turned him into a murderer believed to have been deceased. Realizing that something is amiss, they try to find out the truth about the house before more incidents drive them crazy.The Good News: This here is a really hard film to get into, even for the series fans as there's so little right with it. One of the only things is that the stalking or haunting scenes in the beginning do get pretty good at times. The several bathtub scenes are pretty good, mainly for the nudity, but also due to the fact that there's some really nice spook scenes that come from them. There's some fun to be had with these, and it's some really great fun with these scenes coming in at the right moments. There's also some really nice stuff to come along from the ending chase, which is really nice, has a couple creepy scenes and the film's main gore stuff. Included in the chase is a couple of bloody stabbings, a circular saw blade to the knee and a pretty nifty manner of disposal. It's pretty nice, and remains one of the bright things about the film. The other thing is that the added plot points in here make it feel more than just a usual film entry that copies the formula of the past ad nausea. These here are the only good things about the film that work.The Bad News: This here was a really disappointing entry that has a couple substantial flaws in it. The biggest one is easily the lack of the action in here. This one features only a select few scenes of any real action or excitement, and that means there's long segments of the film with nothing at all that happens and it feels really dull. That's the other major factor to come from this, is that it really feels dull, listless and poorly paced out. There's no need for it to be as lifeless as it is, with only a couple times with anything that will generate excitement. Otherwise, this one here is just punctuated with endless scene after endless scene of the group discussing what's gong on or what they think should be the next course of action. It generates no action, no suspense, nothing at all of interest and is just a method to eat up time that should've been better spent doing anything else, since this one fails at that. It's also hard to take the film as a haunted house film, since there's very little here that can actually be attributed to a haunted house. In fact, this one abandons that in favor of a murder mystery that is so easy to solve it can be done in five minutes and in using that as the crux for the later scenes, it just gets even more dreary, dull and boring. With that manner, it really makes for even worse viewing when there's just nothing in here that has nothing of interest in the way it pans out. These here are the really crippling flaws in the film, and are the ones that are most responsible for it's downfall.The Final Verdict: Without a whole lot going for it but a few rather decent moments, this one is really hard to make it for fans of the series. They should really be the only ones giving this one a shot, as it feels like an entry, while those who haven't been into the series at this point should ignore this one completely.Rated R: Violence, Language and Nudity