I love it when the tagline for a movie doubles as hidden instructions to the unassuming crowd about to view it. It's almost like a disclaimer that you only understand after, in this case, eighty-seven minutes of life draining stupidity that you can't get back without a time machine and a flux capacitor. Yes, dear friends, 2005's The Amityville Horror is truly that awful.
Many will recall 1979's film of the same name starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. It is an old fashioned, effective horror film that uses atmosphere, solid visuals, and down-to-earth characters to get the blood flowing. It is now a cult classic, which means it's ripe for the picking to be slaughtered by producer Michael Bay, who bludgeoned the classic of all horror classics, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with a horrid remake back in 2003.
This 'Amityville" has the identical setup, which is prefaced by the eternal slogan "based on true events." In November of 1974 police were dispatched to the home of the DeFeos, a well-liked, church-going family. The police made a grisly discovery that night to the tune of six dead bodies, all killed with a .35 caliber rifle as they slept.
Family member Ronald DeFeo confessed to committing the crime, but told police that voices inside the house told him to do it. A year later the house is up for sale and for dirt cheap. This immediately peaks the interest of George (Reynolds) and Kathy (George) Lutz. They are an unassuming couple with three kids, Billy (James), Michael (Bennett), and Chelsea (Moretz). The scariest realtor ever tells them of the tragedy that occurred in the house just a year earlier, but the Lutzs press on with their purchase. You can probably guess what happens from here.
Bay and company do what they do best when they get their hands on a project: Suck the life out of it and replace it with ADD-style camerawork, cheap scares, and characters so dumb that you just wish that Leatherface would make a cameo and finish them all off. There are also plot holes galore, with a severe lack of development to the film's backstory. It takes Kathy over an hour into the film to finally get to the library and figure out why their house is off-the-scale bananas. While there she discovers other morbid facts about the house that serve as bait for nightmarish acts that may or may not be real. What's the point? Why not further delve into the religious undertones throughout the film? Who was the man walking outside behind George in a key shot? Ryan Reynolds is crucially miscast here. As a young man of sorts, I would like to deliver a short memo to studios considering using Reynolds in anything other than a comedy: Ryan Reynolds will forever be Van Wilder. Any attempts to get him to act in anything serious will be met with riotous laughter at inopportune times, as was readily apparent at tonight's screening of this film. He was partially responsible for ruining Blade: Trinity, and he strikes again here. The rest of cast is suitably wasted, and unfortunately includes one of the most dependable actors around, Philip Baker Hall. I kept waiting for him to save the film from total oblivion, but it was to no avail.
The screenplay by Scott Kosar is a real Scotch tape job if I've ever seen one, and that's pretty sad considering he had two key documents to adapt from. Character development is zilch and the dialogue that is forced to be spoken is flat out embarassing. As we all know by now, horror characters are by nature stupid, but this is crazy stupid. After one or two nights of seeing blood-drenched dead people I'd be adios amigos. Instead we are forced to endure characters who think it's all just craziness that will pass over if they just hang in there. Andrew Douglas' direction has a nice look, but he clearly struggles in trying to put together a story that is anything other than absurd and carelessly crafted. We're a mile ahead of the story from minute one.
The Amityville Horror is supposedly a true story, even though the true life George Lutz has already publicly blasted this film: "I am appalled at the lack of personal integrity in the name of hype and promotion. This (film) is supposed to be about my family and the 28 days we lived in the house, instead it is something formed in the minds of others not concerned with anything more than box office numbers and self import."
By : Bill Clark (http://www.fromthebalcony.com/ah.htm)
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 3
If you think that the ‘burbs are the best place to bring up kids, think again. When your property is bereft of close neighbors to keep a watch out for them, and that residences in remote areas can be so quiet that you may begin to hear voices, watch out. If you're not convinced that you should live in big cities where there enough distractions to drown out those inner voices, maybe you never saw "In Cold Blood," based on two young killers, their motives and eventual arrest after slaughtering an innocent family. And given the yawn factor of the first
"Amityville Horror," directed by Stuart Rosenberg who had a fondness for schtick, you may still look fondly on living away from metropolitan centers. Andrew Douglas's new "The Amityville Horror, " scripted by Scott Kosar, in turn based on Sandor Stern's screenplay and adapted from Jay Anson's novel, will not scare you away either. Despite some positive attributes, Douglas pumps up the soundtrack with Steve Jablonsky's dissonant music as if to admit that the visuals, the things that go bump in the night, and the principal character's emerging psychotic break, are not enough to stand on their own for either scares or creepiness.
Nor does the hackneyed opening--a dark and stormy night-- set the right tone for an audience that just might prefer to look about, size up the neighbors, check out the man and woman and their three kids. To be fair, Douglas is not wrong to spend a couple of minutes at the opening summing up what happened a year back–a true story by the way–during the wee hours of the morning in the mid-seventies when Ron DeFeo, hearing voices, shoots and kills six members of his family. (I believe the real De Feo is serving multiple life sentences for the mass murder.)
The spooky house on Ocean Avenue in New York's Suffolk County (actually filmed at a Victorian digs in rural Wisconsin) is the principal character. We're introduced to its new paterfamilias, George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds), a contractor who is persuaded by his young wife Kathy (Melissa George) to snap up the 120-year-old place, neither knowing its tragic history nor caring about its locus for some serious criminal activity the year before. They have three kids, the whiny 12-year-old Billy Lutz (Jesse James), who misses his real daddy and doesn't take well to his pumped-up stepfather, and two generic sibs, Michael (Jimmy Bennett) and Chelsea (Chloe Grace Moretz). The first sign of trouble occurs when young Chelsea, the only one so far who sees dead people, gets a look at the ghostly Lisa (Rachel Nichols), who sports a hole in her forehead thanks a large bullet from her wacko older brother's rifle.
There's really nothing new under the Amityville sun. The cliches include shadowy figures who zip past the living human beings too fast for them to get a real look; the satanic images that flash by in one kid's face; the sad look of poor Lisa, who likes to show up for the new residents at 3:15 on most mornings to commemorate the moment she was killed by Ron De Feo. "The Amityville Horror" thankfully downplays the spooks–while on the other hand blasting the music so loud that some dialogue gets lost–while concentrating on the growing psychosis of George Lutz, who has seen one poltergeist too many and is going off the deep end like "The Shining"'s Jack Nicholson. Axe in hand, he demands that his rebellious, adopted son hold wood between his two hands while he fells the logs, one by one, for heating the house. But heat could be the last thing needed at 112 Ocean Avenue: just watch Philip Baker Hall in the role of the town's priest trying to perform an exorcism on the second floor only to have his holy water turned into steam. To see what could be done with this sort of plot, without booming music to tell you how to feel, check the DVD of Joseph Ruben's 1987 film "The Stepfather," about a psycho who marries widows, later erupting into violence.
By : Harvey S. Karten
more The Amityville Horror reviews: <<prev 1 23next>>
