It took three movies to make someone finally figure out that moving into a certain Dutch-style Long Island house was a bad idea even if the house payments had dropped to 50 cents a year.

It’s been years since Tony Roberts’ and his ghostbustin’ team were driven from the house and now the Catholic church has decided to do something about it. So who ya gonna call? As Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes opens, the pope has apparently dispatched his own version of the ATF to raid the Long Island house and kick some Satanic boo-tay. No kidding, the movie opens as a group of priests kick down the door waving crosses and tossing holy water to drive The Prince of Darkness out of the house once and for all. That’s show ‘em!!

It works, in a way, Big Red tucks himself inside a lamp to hide which unfortunately is sold when the church holds a garage sale (that’s not a joke) and sells off the house’s contents. The lamp is sold to a woman who mails it to her sister Alice in California. Now, forgive me for being picky but wouldn’t it have been a better idea if the church tried to contact the people who lived there before and give them there stuff back? Also doesn’t this plot point negate the title? I guess not because then the distributors would be stuck with Amityville 4: The Evil Gets Sold in a Yard Sale and Gets Mailed Back East To Aunt Martha As a Housewarming Gift Because It Would Be Just Darling on Her Mantel And OH MY It Goes With the Curtains. Or something like that.

Back in California, the lamp arrives at Alice’s house just as she’s getting a new houseguest, her daughter Nancy a recent widow with three children. Satan can’t resist his wicked ways and in the midst of Alice and Nancy’s Lifetime Afternoon Movie shenanigans he starts making playdough out of a series of hapless repairmen. One thing leads to another and suddenly we’re back to the same old formula that had us rolling our eyes in three previous Amityville adventures.

To tell you the truth, my mind kept going back to the movie’s opening because I think they really had something there. If the writers had been really ingenious this could have been a really intriguing premise. I imagine the church yardsale selling the lamp containing Satan to an old lady who immediately puts it up on E-Bay. Suddenly all over the world earthbound demons begin trying to power bid to get the lamp containing their Evil Master back but they keep getting sniped by some pesky 10 year-old in De Moines. What kind of ad would you put up for something like that: