WhatzUp

The Amityville Horror
by Derek Neff

Some key differences between the 1979 version of The Amityville Horror and the 2005 remake: there’s no red-eyed pig named Jodie in the remake (instead there’s the ghost of a dead girl named Jodie); there’s no red room in the new one (but there’s a lot more blood); the babysitter in the remake (Rachel Nichols) is sexy (she’s not sporting any weird brace-face thingie for comedic effect as in the 1979 version). Both movies suck, though. They do have that much in common.

The Lutzes think they’ve found the deal of a lifetime when they buy a beautiful Dutch Colonial on Long Island for a song, but that’s because they don’t realize that a multiple murder occurred there just a year earlier. (Oh, wait a minute; they are told this before they sign on the dotted line, but those zany love-birds don’t think it’s a deal-breaker, different strokes bein’ for different folks and all.) Soon - the timeline gets a little fuzzy here, since we’re shown 8mm home-movie footage of their happy move and renovation work, and yet the Lutzes were only there for a month altogether - the Lutz daughter (Chloe Moretz) meets the ghost of the murdered girl, Jodie (Isabel Conner), while George starts having fantasies about murdering his family.

The kids have trust issues with George from the beginning, but before too long we see George becoming verbally abusive toward them. The transition of George from the gentle step-father who tries to form bonds with his wife’s children to the step-father who cruelly makes young Billy (Jesse James) hold each log as he violently splits it with his ax is so quick that we can’t really track it. The movie is much too short and visually jumpy to delve into George’s psychological meltdown, which, to me, is the only interesting part of the story. Reynolds is a talented actor, but even Jack Nicholson needed almost twice Amityville‘s running time to show how he could devolve from a family man into an ax-wielding murderer in The Shining. (Holy cow, did I just compare this movie to The Shining? There should be some sort of fine for such things.)

The movie has everything you could want in a haunted-house movie: a cute family dog (all the better to fulfill a basic horror movie clichÈ because, let’s face it, family pets never fare very well in movies like these); flies swarming out of the ductwork (all the better to scare away the house-exorcist the Lutzes call in to help them out); bad spelling (all the better to “katch” us off our guard); an ax (all the better for a demented Mr. Lutz to wield against his family); and gross-out moments galore (all the better to disguise the fact that the movie, for all its “gotcha” moments, isn’t even remotely scary); it’s even based on a (wink wink) “true story”, which, as you know, makes it even creepier.

The 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror is too well made to be laughed at outright - this isn’t an embarrassingly inept movie by any means, but it’s much too scant and frenetic to be truly involving on any level.