Watching truly frightening horror films is one of my favourite things. A close second is watching B horror movies that were intended to be frightening but unintentionally end up becoming a comedy due to poor production values, horribly written scripts, amateurish acting, and often all of the above.

A prime example of the B horror genre is Amityville: Mt. Misery Rd. The first thing that should be pointed out is that this movie has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the Amityville series, although by sticking the name of this infamous locale in the title, the filmmakers did manage to trick me to watch it over the hundreds of other movies available on streaming services. Kudos to them for some ingenious marketing.

The story begins with some “spooky” photos arriving at the home of Charlie, played by the multi-talented Chuck Morrongiello who also produced, directed, wrote, created the music, supplied the smartphone it was filmed on, and pretty much every other conceivable film related function. The photos show some ghostly orbs that appeared at a place known as Mt. Misery Rd. which apparently is somewhat close to Amityville (justifying the very loose tie-in with the film title).

Charlie plans a visit to Mt. Misery to uncover the mysterious happenings there with his girlfriend Buzi played by his real life wife Karolina Morrongiello who, despite her limited English, is an expert at Googling. Buzi proceeds to spend what feels like an eternity searching the internet for all the strange things that have happened at Mt. Misery, sharing the pictures she finds with her hubby while saying “that’s spooky”, “that’s creepy”, and “that’s scary” so many times I lost count.

In what can only be described as time filler, Charlie and Buzi decide to go to a bar to discuss their trip, leading to a long, awkward scene where Buzi dances in a near empty bar by herself while a song about her having a nice booty (and apparently sung by her) plays. The couple then find out the bar’s lone patron knows all about Mt. Misery and the legend of strange things that happen in the woods. He tells them a confusing story of an asylum that burned down years ago and warns them not to go with all the sincerity that someone who is obviously reading their lines off cue cards can muster.

Of course the couple ignore the guy’s warning not to go and embark for Mt. Misery the next day triggering another long, unnecessary chapter where they film themselves going to the airport, riding an escalator, flying on a plane, checking in to the hotel, etc., etc. Throughout all this, Buzi continues to repeatedly remind us how the trip will be spooky, creepy, scary, etc. I’d venture that 90% of her dialogue in this movie consists of one of those words.

Eventually the couple arrive at Mt. Misery and the remainder of the film is basically video clips of them traipsing through the woods while pointing at the random “spooky” things they find such as a cross hanging from a tree, a wooden post and some stones that surely must be the entrance to the old asylum. The highlight of the film for me was was Buzi’s decision to wear pink pyjama bottoms on this painstaking (mostly for the audience) hike through the wilderness.

 

You really never see anything throughout their ghost hunting hike and we are just left to imagine they are being stalked by all the creatures that Buzi found during her Google image search. I normally don’t like to give away endings of movies but the only thing that survives this hike is Buzi’s pink pyjamas.

Amityville: Mt. Misery Rd. is a very, very bad movie but it’s bad in the best way possible, providing many laughs throughout related to the obviously improvised dialogue, stiff acting, and low production values. I don’t believe that the filmmakers thought they were making Citizen Kane or Psycho here, they probably just wanted to be able to tell their friends that they made a movie. Although there is absolutely nothing scary about this “horror” movie, I laughed more while watching this than any comedy I’ve seen over the last few years and that’s worth something.

On the B movie scale I give Amityville: Mt. Misery Road 3 B’s out of 4.

BBB/BBBB

You can currently stream this movie for free on Tubi and it’s worth every penny.