Crew
Director/Screenplay – Trey Murphy, Producers – Chance Gibbs, Trey Murphy & Micah Marie Stevens, Photography – Jason Vandygriff, Music – Brandon Lau, Visual Effects – Shannon Houk, Makeup Effects – Trinity Erhart. Production Company – Bar G Moving Pictures/AshTrey Productions/[Bracketted] Productions.
Cast
Chance Gibbs (Stanley DeFeo), Micah Marie Stevens (Marie Cameron), Tom Young (Jeremy), Patrick McAlister (Thomas Davenport), Eric Oberto (Asmodeus), Lara Williams (Crystal), James Burleson (Young Jeremy)
Plot
Stanley DeFeo learns that he has inherited a house in Amityville from his grandmother Marie Cameron’s estate and moves there. Among her things, he finds his grandmother’s diary that tells how she relocated to Amityville in 1965 so that her husband Jeremy could take a position as a lawyer. However, she became bored and was seduced by the stranger Asmodeus who led her into a devil worship cult. As Stanley seeks more answers about what happened to Marie, he is warned by others that the cult is all around him.
There has been a mountain of titles that take the name Amityville ever since the hoax that began with the supposedly true-life book The Amityville Horror (1977) where the Lutz family made bogus claims that they were driven out of a house by supernatural forces after 28 days. This was followed by the film based on the book with The Amityville Horror (1979), which proved a big success and was followed by several sequels and then a mountain of films appropriating the Amityville name. Some of these Amityville film claim connection to the original, most just assume the name Amityville and take it to mean something generically scary. (See bottom of the page for a full list of other Amityville films).
Amityville Cult is a fairly cheaply made production. There is no real effort made in trying to approximate the 1960s era in the flashback settings – the lawyer wears a stubby man ponytail, which would probably have him regarded as a hippie or worse back in the day. The flashback scenes also feature Eric Oberto playing the role of Asmodeus in a distracting way where he keeps his eyes wide-open. (You kind of think that calling himself Asmodeus might have tipped people off that he was up to no good, but maybe they were less clued up about deviltry back in 1965).
The film suffers from a slow pace. Nothing much happens throughout. Chance Gibbs reads from his grandmother’s diary and then goes to talk to some people about it. Up until the end, there is not much that ever lifts you out of that lethargy. Right at the end we get an appearance of the cult, which consists of a conspiracy among many of the townspeople and some apparent predestined purpose for Chance Gibbs.
Amityville Cult was the first feature-length film from Trey Murphy. Murphy subsequently went on to make Goatman (2023), as well as producing the serial killer film Blood Dried Hands (2024).
The other Amityville films consists of:- The Amityville Horror (1979), Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Amityville 3-D (1983) and Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989). However, there have been a considerable number of other films also claiming connection including – The Amityville Curse (1989), Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992), Amityville: A New Generation (1993), Amityville: Dollhouse (1996), The Amityville Haunting (2011), The Amityville Asylum (2013), Amityville Death House (2015), Amityville Playhouse (2015), The Amityville Legacy (2016), Amityville: No Escape (2016), Amityville Terror (2016), Amityville: Vanishing Point (2016), Amityville Exorcism (2017), Amityville: The Awakening (2017), The Amityville Murders (2018), Mt. Misery Road/Amityville: Mt. Misery Road (2018), The Dawn (2019), The Amityville Harvest (2020), Amityville Island (2020), Amityville Vibrator (2020), Witches of Amityville Academy (2020), Amityville Cop (2021), Amityville Hex (2021), Amityville in the Hood (2021), The Amityville Moon (2021), Amityville Scarecrow (2021), The Amityville Exorcist (2022), Amityville in Space (2022), Amityville Karen (2022), Amityville Thanksgiving (2022), Amityville Emanuelle (2023), Amityville Shark House (2023), Amityville Bigfoot (2024) and Amityville Webcam (2024). The Amityville Horror (2005) was a remake of the original. There have been several documentaries Amityville 2000/The Amityville Horror: 25 Years Later (2000), The Real Amityville Horror (2005) and Amityville: The Final Testament (2010), which tried to examine what happened in the house, while the parapsychological investigation into the house is also featured in The Conjuring 2 (2016).
Trailer here
Full film available here