“Amityville Turkey Day” – That’s No Cranberry Sauce! Check Out the DVD Here!
Rocco, a sleazy indie film director, is given one last project to director with the stipulation of not to squander the funds and to make a competent hit movie without completely making principal photography a nightmare for the cast and crew. Having landed a large estate to shoot his film, the house comes with a manservant named Bram to take care of their needs and see to the estate grounds. When a man-eating Turkey from Hell, embodied by the evil soul of once infamous doctor, comes home for Thanksgiving dinner, Bram aims to curate a fine feast for the abrasive, wicked bird from the indie film production. As cast and crew begin to dwindle down and disappear, the show-running producer takes charge to motivate and take care of the slipping through the cracks mess of, yet again, another Rocco botched production. Yet, the turkey still hungers and when all the excess meat is consumed, he will then find a human mate to reincarnate himself for human form.
After promising myself, swearing up and down, that I would never, ever watch and review another Amityville titled infused film again, “Amityville Turkey Day” had sucked me right back in, like a moth to the flame into another mindless and pointless, could I even call it this, money-grabbing exploitation of the Amityville title letdown of a holiday-comedy horror film. The 2024, microbudget Thanksgiving themed sequel to “Amityville Thanksgiving” brings back the writing-and-directing duo of Will Collazo Jr. (“Amityville Shark House,” “Amityville Apocalypse”) and Julie Anne Prescott (indie film scream-queen of “The Amityville Harvest” and “Amityville Thanksgiving”) to add a little more sanguine stuffing in their continuation of a terrorizing wild Turkey. Alternatively known as “Amityville Thanksgiving 2,” the feature is an indiegogo crowdfunded campaign that raised the $10,000 goal and became a Will Collazo Jr.’s Cult Cinema production.
The sequel doesn’t return most of the cast from the film. Most sequels don’t, right? Instead, a whole new batch of rough puff principals are basted over the story to try and moisten the flavor of a rather rough-and-ready follow-up. Amongst the medley filled in with B-movie talent, there doesn’t seem to be a one standout lead role to take charge in what is more of convergence of counterproductive parts that overlap and overstep each other’s storyline. Characters also disappear and reappear without context to about where they were and where they go, for example the sleazy director Rocco (Michael Ruggiere) vanishes for most of the story’s midriff and then just reappears in the third act without a sense of where he’s been. Erica Dyer (“The Town Without Halloween,” “Attack of the Corn Zombies”) plays one of the few characters with an actual intact arc as the pissed off producer Ivy who storms in and takes charge of Rocco’s quickly deteriorating production, proving to be a competent leader to quickly organize the film crew into action, but as cast and crew begin to drop like flies and vanishing from the estate set within the Thanksgiving week, Ivy’s honed in focus doesn’t register the killer Turkey, voiced by Steven Kiseleski (“Amityville Karen,” “Amityville Bigfoot”), and it’s righthand caretaker Bram (Dino Castelli, “Screamwalkers”) slowly filleting the filmmakers for feasting. A large portion of the character pie is throwaway fodder for the Turkey with only a couple of others to stand out with pointed out substance, that also point back to “Amityville Thanksgiving, with Kevin (Tim Hatch, “Amityville in Space, and the other actor to return from “Amityville Thanksgiving) on a mission to find out what happened to his sister from “Amityville Thanksgiving,” and his planted actress friend Jessica (Jen Elyse Feldy, “The Elder Hunters,” “Camp Blood 666 Part 2”), but their roles do get lost in the fray of the frenzied packed, plot hole-riddled storyline that crams in too much too hastily inside a jerry-built and unnecessary tale. David Perry, Clint Beaver, Amanda Flowers, Shannon Hall, Jeff Webb, Thomas J. O’Brien, Ralph Rey, James Janso, Stephen Bloodworth, and the late Mark C. Fullhardt, to which this film is dedicated to, fill out as the at will Turkey fodder. And I hope all my listings of “Amityville” named films has brought awareness to this exploitative issue!
“Amityville Turkey Day” is no “Thankskilling.” Jordan Downey has mastered the smack-talking, rude-with-tude, killer Turkey in style, substance, and outrageous kills. Will Collazo Jr.’s film feels more like a cheap knockoff to the likes of the Italian unauthorized remakes, sequels, and spinoffs of American films of the 1980s, attaching the Amityville name to draw attention and sponge off the legitimate franchise that has now become a disgusting and disheartening running joke and parody of unoriginality. “Amityville Turkey Day” mirrors every ounce of that last sentiment with a shoddy, low rent feature that not only drags the Amityville title deeper into the overkill mud but also hurts the exposure of Jordan Downey’s “Thankskilling” to those viewers who do get their unsuspecting hands onto Collazo’s film first and leaves a residual bad taste toward more competent Turkey trot terrorizers. That bitterness is contributed by the lack of story structure and coherency, a lost sense of unique personality and entertainment, and a brutal monotone flow that stagnates upon just one setting over the course of a few days, which is a major gap considering the film crew disappearing here and there during that time and no one happens to care or even hardly notice. Comedy elements fall flat, reduced to fart and sexual gags and missing-the-mark cheap insults surrounded by dull kills, especially for a Turkey that goes for the juggler. Very few moments of levity and intrigue can be pulled from “Amityville Turkey Day” with the puppeteered evil Turkey lobbing an occasional humorous one liner – “Look at all that blood! She’s a squirter!” – and the manifested closet gimp is too strange of a guilty-allure to ignore, and these few and far in between bright spots add a layer of color to what is dull overall.
The crowdfunded clucker had arrived just in time for this year’s Thanksgiving courtesy of indie film friendly distributor SRS Cinema. “Amityville Turkey Day” is housed on an MPEG2 encoded, 480p resolution, 5 gigabyte DVD-R. According to the crowdfunding page, Collazo offered an all-around bigger and better experience from the bareboned, nearly no-budget, precursor, yet the sequel didn’t live up to expectations and appeared to be more of the same slapdash as the first and this translates to a writeable DVD disc with a fuzzy picture, smoothed edges, and plenty of posterization and banding that digs the grave deeper for this overdone bird. The ungraded picture produces unnatural lighting from a series of gelled flood lights, more so with deep red, aimed upward to evoke thicker upper shadow positions. What the result constitutes with the unhelpful lower resolution camera is an overly hot and overly diffused image in what would be Turkey and Bram basement scheming scenes that renders any leftover details washed away from the effect. The English LPCM 2.0 mono track is a flat fixture via the onboard microphone on the digital camera that creates an anemic dialogue presence with subtle distortion. Range consists of post-production sound effects and the close quartered rooms of the “estate” has depth pretty much nonexistent. I will say dialogue is prominent and clear though higher decibels overtake and clip the microphone’s volume intake. English subtitles are optionally available. The release’s special features include a director’s commentary, a making-of behind-the-scenes, the original trailer, and other SRS Cinema prevuews. Aside from an enticing illustrated cover art, the DVD has no other supplemental cover art, inserts, and etc. “Amityville Turkey Day” has a runtime of 93 minutes, is region free, and comes not rated.
Last Rites: “Amityville Turkey Day” is difficult to gobble up. In fact, “Amityville Turkey Day” is much like having to go to your great Aunt’s house for a third Thanksgiving dinner of the day, the one that is the family’s black sheep, wears a muumuu, and her house smells like cheap cigarettes and cat dandruff, it’s a hard no thank you.
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