Werewolves? In the Amityville “franchise”? Well, there’s been witches, zombies, sharks and vampires. You have to remember, we’re in the copyright free Wild West and the odd boom period of slapping Amityville onto shit and seeing what sells. Hell, the damn house has even been to space… so what’s a lycanthrope or two? Alissa and Karla reside in a church-run halfway house and, getting some bad vibes from the joint, they attempt to escape the nightly lockdown. They get attacked by a monster in the building’s basement, Karla is murdered and Alissa manages to flee. Detective Kimble gets assigned to the case of the missing girls by Internal Affairs (huh?) while he’s being investigated for excessive force (that’s not right at all) and heads out to the Saint Matthias House of Rehabilitation to get to the bottom of things. After meeting the staff (Father Peter, Sister Ruth, new employee Father Michael, a bedridden Sister Francis and a handful of residents), Kimble has his suspicions thanks to the behavior of the people in charge and claims of disappearances from a helpful resident he speaks to before leaving. We also see some sinister mopping to let us know that someone at the facility knows what is going on and is actively covering it up. The detective follows a lead to Alissa’s last place of employment, a scuzzy biker-bar/strip-club called The Penny Whistle. Kimble finds Alissa buying a gun from her old partner in crime and then saves her ass when things get aggressive. She lets him know that her friend was killed by a werewolf and she has plans to return with silver bullets. She also clues him in that Father Peter and the two nuns are in on a conspiracy where one girl disappears every month. People start dying and Kimble and Alissa return just in time for the nightly lockdown. There’s an extended group therapy session, a priest with a nice beard, an extended lunch session, performances ranging from kinda awful to somewhat impressive, a bar fight where the goons attack one at a time, the most obvious candidate for werewolfery being the werewolf, disgustingly loud popcorn munching and cheap violence merging well with a fun but not very pliable werewolf costume. I’ll always scratch my head when a movie obviously has a monster costume (even if it is super fluffy and a little silly) and doesn’t have it on screen for most of the runtime. Why do you think we’re here for something called Amityville Moon? You think we want to know more about these people we don’t really give a shit about… especially when we know there’s a werewolf we could be feasting our trash-lovin’ peepers on? It’s still nowhere near as bad as some of the other rambling additions to the shared Amityville universe and at least it seems to be working from a script. You may not want to listen to me though, I love werewolf flicks so I am definitely biased. I think this is the first movie in the Amityville extended universe I’ve seen where nobody mentions or makes a passing reference to Amityville… that’s impressive in a sad way.
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