Amityville Revisited
New Haunted House Flick Lacks Genuine Horror

And the remakes just keep on coming. For every decent Hollywood remake such as Dawn of the Dead or Flight of the Phoenix, we have to suffer through at least ten remakes that just shouldn’t have been remade at all (Psycho, Rollerball). The latest such case is the new version of The Amityville Horror, a movie that had plenty of flaws the first time around and is no better in its latest incarnation.

Home on the Strange. Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George star in the luke-warm remake of The Amityville Horror.

The new version of The Amityville Horror starts off promisingly enough and the filmmakers do a good job of recreating the 70s horror movie spirit. It was an era that brought us such scary classics as The Shining, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and Jaws and through the use of vintage cars and clothes, home movies and other devices, the makers of The Amityville Horror transport the viewer back to a time when horror movies were not dominated by computer graphic effects.

They even use some tried and true techniques such as the hippy babysitter who tells the kids scary stories about the history of the house only to be its very next victim.

All in all, the first half of The Amityville Horror builds nicely with a creepy air of suspense and impending doom. The last third of the film, however, devolves into a cavalcade of freak show imagery as director Andrew Douglas tries to cram as much frightening stuff into one half hour as possible. To make matters worse, Douglas seems to be too afraid to knock off any member of the Lutz family, except in nightmare sequences that end up with someone waking up in a cold sweat. It’s all show with no discernable payoff as the director repeatedly dangles the Lutzes over the precipice of danger only to pull them back to safety at the last moment.

The Amityville Horror is a decent showcase for the acting skills of everyone involved in the cast. Ryan Reynolds basically channels the spirit of The Shining’s Jack Torrance as his George Lutz slips from family man to potential murderer due to the influence of his new habitat. Melissa George plays the sexy mom who must deliver her brood from evil as the power of the house takes over her new husband. The kids—Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett and Chloe Moretz—all bring a believable ordinariness to their parts, making it that much more believable when all hell starts to break loose around them.

Once again the director of a new horror film tries to put the weight of the scares on a demonic child, in this case it is Isabel Connor as the deceased Jodie Defeo, a kid who was killed in a mass murder in the house a year earlier and is now hanging around to warn the new residents and scare the bee-jeebers out of their babysitter. I don’t know about you, but for me scary kids wore out their welcome a long time ago. Give me some genuinely scary serial killer adults or the occasional bloodthirsty monster but stop with the creepy kids (The Grudge, The Ring, etc.).

If the makers of The Amityville Horror had paid half as much attention to the finale as they paid to the build-up, they would have created a nice little scary movie. As it is, the inferior ending makes the entire movie seem like a plot-less pointless mess.

The Amityville Horror is rated R for terror, sexuality, language and brief drug use. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.

100 Scary Movies

The next time you’re in the mood to rent a scary movie, be sure to download the list of “100 Scariest Movie Moments” from the Bravo Television Channel, based on its series of the same name. The series counts down the films from 100 to one and intersperses highlights of the scary movies with interview snippets about them from people such as Stephen King, George Romero, Peter Jackson, Wes Craven, Clive Barker and John Carpenter.

The series and the list are great fodder for debate and valuable resources for film fans heading to the video rental outlet. In addition to the reliable favorites such as Hitchcock films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (#88), Poltergeist (#80) and It’s Alive (#43), the list features more obscure films such as Audition (#11) and Suspiria (#24).

So what do the experts consider the top five scariest films? The Bravo list gives its top ratings to films that were groundbreaking when they were first released theatrically—those movies that gave you the kind of heebie-jeebies that stayed with you long after you left the theater. They are: #5-Texas Chainsaw Massacre; #4-Psycho; #3-The Exorcist; #2-Alien; #1-Jaws.