Amityville Thanksgiving (2022) Review
Everyone complains, and justifiably so, about Christmas turning up during the Thanksgiving season. So to help balance it out, I’m reviewing Amityville Thanksgiving, which I somehow missed when it came out during the Christmas season. And besides, turkeys are a key part of each holiday’s celebration.
Frank Domonico (Mark C. Fullhardt, Faces of the Dead, The Incoherents) is Amityville’s resident marriage counsellor. As the film opens he’s talking into a camera and recording a video which conveniently serves to set up the plot. Jackie (Natalie Peri, Left Out for Dead, Gangster Wives) and Danny’s (Paul Faggione, Bloody Nun 2: The Curse, Empires of New York) marriage is apparently beyond even his help. So as a last effort, he’s invited them out to his remote cabin for Thanksgiving dinner.
They don’t find his willingness to work over the holiday odd and accept his offer. His sessions with them produce emotionally revealing admissions as Jackie admitting “I want him to want me like he did in the beginning”. The good doctor shows his sympathy to her plight by stroking her thigh as she talks. He also tells Danny to just take her and ravage her. When Danny says maybe if she’d shut up and stop nagging he might feel like it, Doc asks “Have you tried just shoving something in her mouth?” Quite the enlightened fellow isn’t he?
By this point, a few things about Amityville Thanksgiving were becoming clear. Most notably it most likely didn’t have a script, or if it did there was just an outline without any dialogue. Characters give deliver wandering, unfocused monologues. They stumble through their lines and repeat themselves frequently as though they’re making it up as they go. And for the most part they’re painfully bad at both improvisation and acting, delivering everything in a flat monotone.
Finally, about forty minutes in, we find out there’s some cannibalism involved in Amityville Thanksgiving’s plot. Not by actually seeing it, that would mean spending money on effects, but by a character telling the camera about it. That’s pretty much how we find out about the film’s other revelation as well because almost nothing actually happens on screen. And what little does features such poor animation, it looks like somebody downloaded a couple of GIFs off of a Halloween website and composited them into the film.
As a final insult to the viewer, despite being listed as an hour and thirteen minutes long, Amityville Thanksgiving pretty much ends at the fifty-minute mark. After that, it’s twenty minutes of video clips where random people talk about the doctor, followed by ten minutes of credits. That’s probably the footage sent in by all the donators to the crowdfunding campaign who coughed up enough to get the “appear in the movie” perk. So you get fifty minutes of “plot” followed by twenty minutes of random footage the filmmakers were paid to include. Nice little scam, isn’t it?
Granted I wasn’t expecting great things from Amityville Thanksgiving, but writer/director Will Collazo Jr. isn’t untalented. Bloody Nun and its sequel Bloody Nun 2: The Curse is both good examples of microbudget horror spoofs. And that’s what I was hoping for here, instead I ended up with something that’s almost painful to watch and feels like an insult to anyone who actually sat through it, let alone paid for the privilege.
Amityville Thanksgiving is available on Blu-ray from SRS Cinema or free to watch on the Kings of Horror YouTube channel. Just be warned, even after watching it for free, I felt like I had been ripped off. This isn’t just bad, this is legitimately among the worst films I’ve ever seen. If you want something similar, but hopefully better, FilmTagger can offer some suggestions.