Crossroads Minute Bimonthly Newsletter: A Movie Recap ("Amityville 1992: It’s About Time")

Hey, everyone! Erin here, from Crossroads Minute. Before James and I joined the Scavengers Network Patreon, we used to do a monthly newsletter over at our own Patreon page, and when we started Newsies Minute we began using it to cover things that were related to Newsies. 

We are continuing that trend here, every other month. 

This month I was going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, because Zoe Saldana is in it. But then during editing I was reminded that our good friend* Ellen Heuer did foley work for not just Newsies, but also Crossroads, and also...Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, in which a man brings home a haunted (or demonic?) clock taken from the Amityville house. And I thought to myself, “Self, why watch a movie that people say is really good when you COULD watch a movie that you know won’t be?” (Is that backwards thinking? Probably! But here we are!)

God this movie looks so bad. I’m so excited. Let’s do this.

Oh real quick, a couple CWs--no in-depth discussion of any of it, but mentions: dog attacking people, injury to dog/dog death (I know, but I swear it's a nothing moment), a swastika, guns, torture chambers, cannibalism, hanging, electrocution, stabbing. In the movie it's all very cheesy-horror-movie, and the recap mentions it all in little more depth than just listing it does, but if any of those are a huge trigger for you, I wanted to post a warning.

Okay, it’s starting off with some fun, creepy ambient music. I have a feeling this is the high point of this movie. (I half hope I’m wrong and that this movie turns out to be super good.)

We open with a storm, as all cheesy horror movies do. Lots of wind. Leaves blowing everywhere. An older woman walking along the street is concerned when a taxi drives by her. We get a MEGA CLOSE UP of her Very Concerned Eyes. The taxi stops in front of a house and a man gets out holding a box marked “fragile”. It’s all very windy and spooky and hokey. The ambient music from the opening credits has continued to play. 

This may be a good time to mention that I’ve never seen any of the other Amityville movies so I don’t even know how likely it is that a clock from that house would be haunted. Or demonic. Or whatever.

The man repeatedly rings the bell to the house before pulling out keys to open the door. A woman answers as he’s unlocking it and welcomes him home. He continues to stand on the porch for the remainder of their conversation despite the fact that a) this is his house and b) it’s super windy outside. 

He finally comes inside and tells his family that the item in the box is what their house has been missing. (I bet it’s a haunted clock!) (I win, it’s totally a haunted clock.) 

There is so much sponge-painting on every wall of this house. Do you remember that trend from the ‘90s? Ugh. 

He puts the clock on the mantle, where it just starts working even though it wasn’t working in the box. No one is bothered by this. It’s playing the music from the credits. (Or the music is playing. Unclear if the family can hear it.) The family all stands by, staring at the clock. Dad says, “It came from one of those houses we tore down for the development.” I guess his company builds developments—houses, I’d assume, based on the word “development”. He lights a fire in the fireplace to "complete the picture" or something. 

I wonder if we’ll see the old lady from the beginning again or if she was just set dressing. 

Oh wow hey there she is. Mega-close-up and everything. She appears to be seeing the Amityville house (I assume) superimposed over the actual house the man went into. 

Oh maybe he’s an architect. He’s got architect-y things in his office. 

Wait whoa the lady who answered the door isn’t his wife? He just thanked her for coming over to take care of his family on short notice while he was away. His wife is dead, apparently, and has been for 3 years. But he is now hitting on the woman so I guess he’s not too sad about it. She has a boyfriend but agrees to stay the night anyway and they have the sweatiest sex I’ve ever seen. It looks like someone just poured water on them. When they’re done, the man (Jake, is his name) starts complaining about how loud the clock is. 

Jake falls asleep, Babysitter Lady (we still don’t know her name, or if we do I missed it) goes downstairs. The clock is making all sorts of weird noises, and there’s a drill bit coming out of it? 

I probably won’t react to EVERYTHING that happens onscreen but we’re still in setup mode so I need to make sure you all have an accurate picture. 

Okay I’m not sure how this will play into the plot but it’s funny: Jake’s teenaged son Rusty hears a dog bark outside so he goes to the kitchen and opens the door. A German Shepherd is politely sitting outside the door and he asks the dog why she’s out so late. It’s unclear if the dog is his family’s or just a neighbor dog. Rusty takes a soda from the fridge and the dog comes inside and bumps the fridge door into Rusty, who drops the soda. It pops open and we are tested to a long shot of it on the floor, spinning around and spraying everywhere. Rusty follows the dog (Peaches) through the house and finds her barking at the clock. Just sitting there nicely, barking away. Doin’ a protec’. Rusty ushers Peaches back outside. I guess she’s not theirs. We never see that soda mess get cleaned up.

Rusty tries to turn on the light in the room the clock is in but when he flicks the switch, instead of the light coming on, the room morphs into a whole different room. Lots of candles, clock on the mantle but now it’s a different mantle in a different place. Rusty turns the switch off and the room returns to normal. He tries the switch a few more times but all it does is turn the light on and off like it’s supposed to. Oh wait nope there it goes again, being a creepy room. He tries one more time and the lightbulb over the clock explodes, which alarms him more than the room turning into a WHOLE OTHER FUCKING ROOM does. 

Rusty goes upstairs and runs into his dad, who is really upset that he was downstairs? (“What are you doing down there? I SAID, what are you DOING DOWN THERE??”) Chill, Jake. Why shouldn't Rusty be downstairs in his own house?

Andrea! That’s babysitter lady’s name! Thanks, daughter whose name I have forgotten, for telling me!

The storm is over the next morning so Jake goes jogging. He sees Peaches and her owner and tells the owner that she ought to have Peaches on a leash. Peaches barks at him. 

His fancy ‘90s digital watch is beeping and seems to be malfunctioning as he reaches what looks like a quarry or construction site of some kind? He turns around and sees Peaches and her owner standing behind him. Owner lady looks like a robot or zombie or something, just staring blankly. She lets go of the dog, who rushes Jake, snarling. He tries to climb a fence but Peaches grabs his ankle and just really mauls the shit out of him, so he breaks a bottle over her muzzle and then STABS HER IN THE EYE WHAT THE FUCK AM I WATCHING. She is undeterred and continues to chew on his leg as he screams. 

What. The. Fuck. 

Now we are at the hospital with Andrea, who is talking to the doctor about Jake. Apparently Jake got himself home? The doc says he’ll be up on his feet soon. What? How?? That dog ate the FUCK out of his leg. I’m surprised he has any muscle left on his calf. 

Old lady from before (Iris/Mrs. Wheeler) is hanging out in her yard when Rusty comes up. He’s skipped school and apparently they play chess in her garden sometimes? He tells her about the room switching around and she’s like “Yeah, something is totally haunting your house. It’s old and bad and needs a new home because where it used to call home is no longer safe.” Rusty seems to take this revelation in stride and not be at all concerned about how she knows this. 

Jake and Andrea are fighting on the way home from the hospital. She’s upset that she’s always dropping her life to come when he calls. She says she’ll stay a few days while he recovers, she’s sleeping on the couch, and then they’re done forever. 

Jake’s in bed with bloody bandages wrapped around his ankle and thigh. There’s no way he’s gonna be “up on his feet” in a few days. I mean, he walks from the car to the house during the fight, so clearly he is, but this looks like a mortal set of wounds here. He yells at Andrea for opening the blinds, and he’s all sweaty and shaking like he’s got a horrific fever. She takes off the bandage to clean his wound and y’all, this is not only some Halloween party store-level makeup, but there’s no way a dog locking its jaws around Jake’s leg and shaking him would produce what looks like claw marks. This is Bad Horror Makeup.

Andrea and Rusty go to talk to Mrs. Tetman, Peaches’s owner, to make sure Peaches is up to date on rabies vaccines. Mrs. Tetman has no idea what they’re talking about. Peaches has no injuries despite Jake having stabbed her in the face. 

Rusty is all, “Mrs. Wheeler and I know what’s going on. EVIL is going on!” Andrea rolls her eyes at him. As well she should. He’s acting like a weirdo. 

Back at home, Jake is feverish and rambling. Rusty and Lisa (the daughter) are discussing whether or not Peaches will have to be put down. Rusty says that once a dog has a taste for blood it’s all over, even if the dog isn’t possessed by an evil force. *eye roll emoji* He goes into the clock room to get something and when he comes back to the kitchen, the kitchen is nighttime and Andrea is in her robe and asking him why he left in the middle of dinner. 

So, the demon clock is making time skip, I guess?

Lisa tells Andrea to sleep in her room and says she’ll take the couch. So Lisa is about to get fucked up by that clock. 

Which is so loud she can’t sleep. She tries to take it down from the mantle but it won’t move (remember the drill bit from earlier? It appears to have attached itself to the mantle). She goes to ask Andrea if she can share her bed, and Andrea says to go get her pillow (which, honestly, she should have brought with her because did she really think Andrea was gonna say “Sorry kid, you said I could have your room, tough luck”?). The clock chimes 3 am and suddenly the door to the room slams shut, locking Lisa inside. (Lisa reminds me a lot of Sarah in Newsies. Pretty brunette who is barely even a plot device.) She starts to yell and bang on the door but her screams cannot be heard from outside the room. 

We see the door to Andrea’s bedroom open and something lift the comforter next to her. Thinking it’s Lisa coming in, she reaches over to pat her goodnight and her hand is submerged in black slime—but when she turns the light on, everything is normal. She goes to find Lisa, who can now be heard banging on the door(?), and rescues her. Lisa is freaking out like a child. Like, if you’re 7 and you get locked in a room in the middle of the night, sure. Go ahead and freak out. But Lisa is a teenager. I can understand being rattled, but she’s clinging to Andrea and sobbing, “I was locked in,” which just seems a bit much for someone her age. Worst thing that’s going to happen if you get locked in your living room overnight is you have to wait till someone wakes up and wonders why the door to this room that only even has a door because of this one scene is closed, and they let you out. 

I know I said I wasn’t going to just recap the movie, but we are half an hour in and I don’t think it’s going to start making any more sense, so I’m just going to lean into it. 

Mrs. Tetman goes out to her backyard to call Peaches in and hears the dog whimpering from...inside the pool filter? She lifts the lid on the filter and we see a bloody dog snout sticking out of it. I'm not sure how the dog fit in there because this thing is like 6 inches across, but I guess haunted demon clocks have their ways.

The next morning Andrea goes outside to get the paper and sees the house across the street has a swastika painted on the garage door, and someone is telling a cop that Rusty did it. 

Ope, now we’re in Jake’s home office, where he’s frantically drawing the Amityville house (I only know this is the Amityville house because I've seen trailers and stuff for the other movies, there's never anything referenced by Jake about the house being the one the clock came from), wrapped in a blanket and raving about “it’s not the right concept”. Andrea tries to tell him about Rusty/the swastika, and Jake shouts at her: “aren’t you gone yet?”, “you’re not helping!”, etc. For some reason instead of leaving this stupid house, she goes to the kitchen to eat breakfast. 

Bam, it’s nighttime! The cops are asking Rusty about the swastika. The female cop is playing bad cop and she’s really not convincing at it. Rusty swears neither he nor his friends had anything to do with it. 

Oh surprise, Andrea’s boyfriend Leonard is here! He brought wine and takeout. (He’s pretty cute, in a bearded, tweed-wearing way. Definitely cuter than Jake. He’s also awkward AF. Supposedly he’s a psychiatrist but now they’re saying he teaches at the university, but he clearly has no people skills so he’s probably not very good at either job.)

Oh now he’s psychoanalyzing her and she’s not having it. He suggests to her that Jake mauled his own leg to keep her around. The more this man talks, the less attractive he gets. 

Andrea asks what time it is, and Leonard says his watched stopped. Suddenly, Andrea notices flames! The hedge caught fire but don’t worry, the entire neighborhood was there to put it out. Andrea races to Rusty’s room to accuse him of setting the fire? (I should have mentioned earlier that in addition the skipping class, Rusty also wears black t-shirts and has an earring and plays guitar. He’s a classic rebel, that Rusty, with his music and his playing chess with the old lady neighbor. He MUST have done the swastika and the fire because who else could it possibly be if not the obvious bad seed we are suddenly being told he is?) He tells Andrea that he’s been TRYING to TELL them there’s an EVIL FORCE at work, and she yells that the only evil force around here is him, and storms out. 

Yikes.

Andrea and Leonard are fighting more. He’s accusing her of still being in love with Jake. She insists she’s not so he starts to make out with her so she can prove it. Grossssssssssss.

Later, Leonard goes to the kitchen for a slice of pie, which he puts in the microwave. The microwave beeps every second as it counts down, which would BREAK me, but he seems unbothered by it. Until the beeps start to slow, that is. And the ceiling fan stops spinning as fast. And then both stop. 

And then suddenly Jake is there! Sitting across from Leonard, bitching about technology, dressed in regular clothes instead of pajamas! Leonard is scared! Jake thanks him for coming to help out. Then holds up a gun. 

I suspect Leonard is not long for this world. Leonard suspects the same thing. 

Jake accuses Leonard of fucking “my Andrea”. Then he suggests Leonard is going after Lisa next, and fires the gun as Leonard screams. 

Except none of that really happened. Suddenly the fan turns back on and the microwave starts beeping and Andrea is there wondering why he’s screaming and then we get a close-up of the clock, which has a disc on it that used to have a creepy moon face but now we see it clicking over to something else. Not sure what. Looks like probably a devil.

Lisa is tossing and turning on the sofa again. (She can’t have her bed because Leonard and Andrea are using it to prove their love.) She sits up and notices her reflection in the mirror. Waves at it (as you do). Gets up and starts preening, pulling her old-lady-from-1903 nightgown tight against her body so it shows off her figure. You know, normal stuff you do when a haunted clock is keeping you awake at 3 am and your dad’s girlfriend is using your bed to have sex with her boyfriend. 

Welp my TV just shut off and every time I try to go back into Amazon to resume the movie I hit play and the TV shuts off again. So I think the demon clock has infected my television. 

Okay got I working again. I will defeat you, demon clock!

Okay so Lisa's fluffing her hair in the mirror, which is weird because it’s 3 am and this is not the time, Lisa, and then her reflection starts licking its lips suggestively so she...turns around to look behind her. Because that makes sense. There’s no one there. She blows her reflection a kiss and then...slides her nightgown off one shoulder?? The fuck?

She then rights her clothing but her reflection doesn’t. Her reflection grabs its boobs and starts pulling its nightgown up to show some leg, and then REACHES THROUGH THE MIRROR TO RUB LISA’S BREASTS. AND LISA LIKES IT. She’s sweating and about to orgasm from her reflection touching her boobs, but then she suddenly collapses and the mirror starts to ooze black sludge. 

Morning! Andrea and Rusty have breakfast like she didn’t call him evil last night and accuse him of trying to burn the house down. She asks him about the “evil” he mentioned and he casually says that there’s evil inside them and it wants to live in this house and they need to move. Andrea doesn’t believe him. Probably she should.

OH MY GOD LISA JUST WALKED IN WEARING A BLACK TUBE TOP AND MINISKIRT, HAIR TEASED TO THE STARS, BRIGHT RED LIPSTICK, AND WHAT APPEARS TO BE ONE OF HER DAD’S SPORT COATS. SHE LOOKS FUCKING RIDICULOUS AND I LEGIT LAUGHED OUT LOUD. 

Oh it IS one of her dad’s sport coats. Andrea says she’s going to be cold and she says she borrowed one of dad’s jackets and that Andrea isn’t her mother, but she mispronounces Andrea’s name. (Up to now it’s been AN-dree-uh, Lisa now calls her an-DRAY-uh.) She tells them she’s got a date tonight and not to wait up. 

Rusty goes to hang out with old lady Wheeler. She asks him to describe the creepy room he saw that first night, so he closes his eyes and describes it like he’s being hypnotized. Basically it was a medieval torture chamber. She shows him a book with a sketch of the room in it and tells him he was looking back in time to 15th century France. The dude who owned this room was a teacher at a school for boys who used to torture and cannibalize kids. Cool. Cool cool cool.

Old Lady Wheeler asks Rusty where his father went on his business trip. “Back Wast. A town called Amitsville or something.” Of course she knows he means Amityville and she knows it’s bad. She sends Rusty home and puts on some truly discordant music to look up some stuff in some books. Just from looking at the picture of that torture room and another room containing the clock, she realizes that the box she saw Jake carrying that first night contained the clock in the pictures and that that clock is what’s ruining everything. 

She goes outside and time does a weird slow-down thing where a delivery man’s voice gets real slow but the rest of the world seems to be just fine. She gets her cane caught in a crack in the street and brown liquid starts to bubble out of it, as the clock ticks from the moon face to a devil face and the delivery van puts itself into drive, headed right for her. She dives behind a brick pillar and the the van swerves to follow her, hitting the pillar. She thinks she’s safe but oh no, there’s a giant metal bird on top of the van and it falls off and impales her. 

Rusty goes back to her house and finds her missing. He sees the two pictures of the clock and starts to piece things together but then the cops show up to arrest him. (For what, I’m not currently sure. He literally just turns around to see them standing there holding up handcuffs tauntingly.)

Apparently Old Lady Wheeler either isn’t dead, or wasn’t put in a body bag, as we see her being put into an ambulance with her face uncovered, eyes staring blankly. She sure LOOKS dead. 

Andrea discovers Jake in bed surrounded by dirty plates and food wrappers, flies buzzing around, one of the wounds on his leg bleeding so badly through the bandage that the blood is just running down his leg like it was a faucet that got turned on. She calls the doctor and Jake wakes up and tries to strangle her. She hits him over the head with a phone and runs downstairs, where Leonard has just arrived. Leonard apparently thinks the best way to handle thinks is to tie Jake to the bed face-down and inject him with Thorazine until medical assistance arrives. Great idea, Leonard. Andrea seems unbothered by this. 

Cut to Lisa and her boyfriend making out in the car. She tells him they’re going to play “Hansel and Gretel” and to close his eyes and count to ten and then follow the trail. He does so, picking up various clothing items she’s shed as he goes. He finds her in a basement (hers? unclear) sitting in the middle of a toy train set in her underwear. She puts on his letter jacket and somehow removes her bra with both her arms staying in the jacket sleeves (this is the least probably thing that's happened in this entire movie so far). Boyfriend, now down to his tighty-whiteys, moves towards her, only to become stuck in a puddle of black sludge and sucked with it down a drain. Lisa, being Evil now, takes this in happy stride. 

Back to Leonard, now in the bathtub, and finds the tub to be suddenly full of black sludge. He rubs it all over his face to discover this so now his face is covered in chunky black goo. Gross. A hand shoots up toward him from the goo and he flings himself out of the tub, which is now overflowing. With water, because the sludge was imaginary. 

Or was it? He reaches to turn off the tap and a bloody Jake launches out of the water at him, screaming. (At least I think it was Jake. It may have been Lisa’s boyfriend. Hard to say, as his face was smeared with blood and he was thrashing about and I only saw him for a moment, in profile.) Andrea finds Leonard curled in the fetal position, muttering about “there’s somebody here”.

Tick tock goes the clock. 

Jake wakes up, tied to the bed and ANGRY AS FUCK.

Andrea goes into Jake’s office, where by the light of a flickering bulb she inspects his model for the new development he was in Amityville to build. Added to it is a model of the Amityville Horror house, with a tiny man hanging by a noose and a swastika painted on it (or on a nearby house, maybe, rewind was being uncooperative so I couldn't check). Also, tiny tombstones with all their names, and either Jake’s handwriting is truly terrible or his full name is “Jacub”, which honestly I hope it is. 

Andrea, horribly disturbed, runs to Jake’s room and discovers him missing. She flings open the window shutter to see Leonard hanging by a noose outside the window. She grabs a giant compass (the kind for drawing circles, not the kind for telling where north is) off the wall to use as a weapon and goes in search of Jake. 

Instead she finds Rusty, who I guess got out of jail? Last I saw he was in the back of a cop car. He tells Andrea that the clock makes people evil. They try to leave but the doorknob break off and turns into black sludge. 

The cops are here! Apparently they “let that Sterling kid go” (that’s Rusty) and now they’re back because someone called them back out to the neighborhood? 

Rusty goes to look for Lisa. He finds her room covered—and I mean COVERED—in bloody handprints. She’s cowering on the floor, covered in blood. He picks her up to carry her out and she sticks her tongue in his ear, in an extremely grotesque close-up shot. 

Andrea is inside the house banging on the door begging for the cops to help her, but they can’t see or hear her, even though they are looking in the windows right at her. They leave. Jake appears behind Andrea, his leg rotting away, rambling about power and sacrifice. He throws Andrea through a wall and then starts kissing her. She starts to hit him with one of his architecture tools and he pins her to the wall with the giant compass on either side of her throat. 

Rusty is now locked in the blood-room with Evil Lisa, who won’t let him out. She’s hitting on him hard, pinning him to the ground, asking him to kiss her. (This scene is happening simultaneously with the Andrea-Jake scene above, I just didn’t want to make y’all read back-and-forths every other sentence.) Rusty unplugs a cord (like an AUX cable type cord, but bigger--not a "plug into the wall to make it turn on" type cord) from something and jams it into Lisa’s mouth, so she’s sucking it like a pacifier, and it electrocutes her. I don’t understand how, but there it is. 

Rusty runs downstairs and rescues Andrea (who Jake is calling an-DRAY-uh like Evil Lisa did—I guess when you turn evil you stop being able to properly pronounce people’s names? What a weird way for the filmmakers to decide to differentiate Good from Evil, as if the festering leg and Bad Janet outfit and total personality changes weren’t enough). The clock starts to spin backwards (??) as Rusty rushes Jake (and he goes all wibbly-wobbly so I think maybe he disappears as time moves backwards??), and Andrea pulls the compass free and stabs Jake in the gross leg with it. He stumbles away, yelling, “What...time? Clock! What...time??” Andrea thinks he’s dead but he wakes back up just long enough to ask her to stay the night and promise he’ll be a gentleman, and then he dies again. 

Oh SHIT Rusty didn’t disappear, he became a TODDLER! LMAO what the hell! Andrea tells him to go wait outside (??) and I swear to you she says “Mommy will be right out” except she’s NOT HIS MOM WHAT IS HAPPENING. She tells the clock to let him out so it opens the door and lets Toddler Rusty leave???

Andrea picks up an architecture tool and bashes the clock with it after saying...wait for it...”It’s time.” (I just.) Except she misses the clock and hits the wall, which breaks, and the drywall pulls away to show black sludge-covered clockwork happening behind it. The clock is the house, the house is the clock, tick tick tick tock tock tock! 

The clock-winding key turns, the hands spin, Andrea turns into an old lady!!! She finds the fire-lighter from way back at the beginning of the movie and clicks it and there’s a firey explosion that engulfs her and the clock. 

New shot, Andrea-as-she-should be, clutching the architecture tool and sleeping propped against the wall. It’s a very Christianity-reminiscent picture, as the tool is shaped vaguely like a cross. Someone rings the doorbell repeatedly. Andrea is confused. What happened? Why isn’t she old? Why isn’t she dead?? 

She goes to answer the door and it’s JAKE! Just arrived from his trip to Amityville! We’re back at the beginning of the movie!! He pulls the clock out of its box and Andrea freaks OUT and smashes it on the ground, then hits it repeatedly with the tool before exiting in tears. 

“What the hell was that all about?” Jake asks, following her as she gets her bags and walks out the door. She turns to face him. 

“It’s about time, that’s what.”

(I DIED.)

Jake and Lisa wander away, but Rusty watches Andrea get into her car and drive away. He sees Old Lady Wheeler across the street, smirks, and says, “Pure evil.” She smirks back, and we cut to credits. 

I will never forgive this movie for not ending after Andrea said “It’s about time.” That’s the NAME of the MOVIE why would you not end on that???

This movie was very bad and totally worth watching if you like very bad horror(?) movies. It's free on Amazon Prime.

Thank you for coming on this ridiculous ride with me.

*We do not actually know Ellen Heuer. But she did some good clock and gross-stabby-squelchy sounds in this!