My quick rating – 2.9/10. Oh no…Cinema Epoch. Seeing that logo pop up scares me almost as much as The Asylum. I went from “this might be fun” to “what level of #turkey will this be?” Still, I had a tiny bit of hope. An Amityville-flavoured Maniac Cop knock-off? That has potential. Amityville Cop is only 68 minutes, how much damage could it really do?
The movie opens with some suspiciously familiar-looking city skyline drone footage that screams “stock footage subscription,” before introducing a couple saying goodbye. They seal it with a kiss, he drives off…and immediately gets pulled over by a creepy demonic cop. Let’s just say he didn’t get out of the ticket. He got removed from the human population count.
Right from the start, Officer Miller (Jason Toler) is the best thing in the movie. The bar is very low. He casually explains an arrest involving a broken table with such deadpan seriousness that I honestly wondered if I’d already reached the film’s comedic peak. Turns out…I probably had.
The plot never bothers explaining why this demonic cop exists. He just wanders around murdering people because…he was sorta wronged by his partner? It’s very vague. Sometimes less is more. Unfortunately, the kills are almost all hidden by awkward editing or happen off-screen, so even that novelty wears thin pretty quickly.
The script is wonderfully ridiculous without meaning to be. At one point it’s apparently perfectly normal for someone to have a rocket launcher sitting at their desk inside the local police station. You know…standard police equipment.
What annoyed me was the filmmakers seemed convinced they were making a serious horror film. The wisecracking killer cop occasionally injects some accidental laughs, but everyone else treats the material like it’s deadly serious. Focusing on the absurdity could have made this a fun little B-movie.
And then there’s the Amityville connection…or rather, the complete lack of one. Aside from borrowing the name for marketing purposes, nothing here remotely resembles anything associated with Amityville mythology. You could rename this Demon Cop and absolutely nothing would change.
Ironically, there is one fun bit of trivia. Laurene Landon appears here as a satanic cult leader and also starred in the first two Maniac Cop films. That’s probably the closest this movie ever comes to earning a comparison. Sadly, instead of capturing any of that trilogy’s cheesy fun, this feels like an incredibly watered-down rip-off.
Most of the runtime consists of painfully stiff conversations inside what appears to be someone’s empty house doubling as a police station, interrupted by more stock drone footage and bloodless kill scenes. It quickly becomes repetitive and surprisingly dull for something involving a supernatural killer cop.
I’ve certainly seen worse Amityville cash-grabs over the years, but this comfortably sits in the same entertainment bracket as Amityvillenado. Another movie you watch more because the title amuses you than because the film itself does.
By the time the credits rolled, I disconnected this one from my movie library almost as quickly as the Demon Cop disconnects people from life.
Would I recommend Amityville Cop? Only if you’re trying to complete the endless Amityville collection or enjoy watching low-budget horror oddities for the unintentional comedy. If you’re actually hoping for a supernatural Maniac Cop-style horror film, this one never comes close to delivering.
