‘The Amityville Horror’

A series of horror’s greatest hits are paraded out in this tired remake.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

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Ryan Reynolds considers giving his haunted house an extreme makeover in The Amityville Horror.


   There are two kinds of horror movies. In the first kind, regular people get stuck in a nightmarish situation and fight to get out. Of course, these people are always a little smarter and more resourceful, and a lot better looking than you and me: It’s a movie. But they’re enough like us that we can’t help but scream—or choke back a scream — when they come face to face with the evil they’re fighting.
   The second kind makes you want to scream too, but only in frustration. "Run away, run away!" you want to yell at their clueless heroes, who keep marching into closets or basements to find out what’s making that strange noise.
   The Amityville Horror is the second kind.
   At first, you might think George (Ryan Reynolds) and Kathy (Melissa George) Lutz just seem a bit slow because we know more than they do. Even if you didn’t see the original 1979 movie or any of the other five sequels and prequels it spawned, including Amityville Dollhouse and Amityville 3-D, you probably know it was based on a book by the real George and Kathy, which they claimed was based on true events (that claim has since been debunked). Chances are you also know the story: The Lutz family, a young couple and her three children from a previous marriage (her first husband died), move into a lovely old Dutch colonial in a Long Island town with the made-for-TV name of Amityville. Kathy and George know why the house was such a steal: The last owners were murdered one night by their teenage son, Ronald. What they don’t know is that Ronald said voices in the house drove him to murder his family, and that those voices will soon tell George Lutz to do the same.
   But ignorance is not the only source of Kathy’s bliss. As soon as the house starts exerting its weird powers — and it doesn’t take long — she pushes right back, exhibiting awesome depths of denial. Is daughter Chelsea’s new best friend "the girl in my closet," who happens to have the same name as the girl who was killed in that very closet? Hey, you know kids and their imaginary friends! Do Kathy and George have to call an ambulance to haul away the bloodied babysitter, who’s gibbering hysterically about that same dead girl, when they come home from a dinner date? Good help sure is hard to find. Did Kathy see the refrigerator magnets rearrange themselves to read a bloodthirsty slogan the killer had scrawled all over the house before going on his rampage? Well, gosh, she must have imagined it.
   Run away, run away!
   The real mystery is how easily Kathy accepts George’s deterioration. She does nothing as he morphs from her sweet, adoring soulmate to a red-eyed beast who snarls at her children, snaps at her, and spends all day — and all night — in the basement, though he reverts to his old, perky self whenever they get away from the house. Run away, run away! "Have you lost your mind?" she finally asks after he nearly drowns her. "You tried to kill me!" I guess it just takes a lot to get some people’s attention.
   Buried under the cheap scares may be a hint of a story about how kids can get neglected after a parent’s remarriage. In a couple of creepy scenes, George eavesdrops as Kathy talks to her children about how they all miss their father, and he’s clearly disturbed by what he hears even before he falls under the influence of the evil abode. Meanwhile, Kathy is so eager to make her marriage work that she doesn’t seem to notice that George has begun to split logs the way Jack kept writing the same sentence in The Shining (maybe she’s blinded by his admittedly spectacular pecs), and she’s nowhere to be seen when he starts making her older son, Billy, hold the logs, his axe slicing perilously close to the terrorized boy’s fingers.
   With the possible exception of the sullen, unhappy Billy (Jesse James), the characters are too generic to make us care what happens to them. When that’s the case, filmmakers can sometimes pull us in by finding vivid new ways to depict the action. But, aside from an adrenaline-pumping opening sequence where lightning provides strobe-like flashes of light while Ronald systematically shoots his parents and siblings, there’s not an ounce of visual flair or original thinking on display in this Clichés R Us franchise.
   Instead, a series of horror’s greatest hits are paraded out on cue: the windows and doors that keep swinging open or slamming shut on their own, the instant nostalgia of the Lutzes’ super-wholesome Super-8 home movie, the scary-looking dead people who loom into sight behind people’s shoulders in bathroom mirrors, the frantic microfiche search at the local library, the inevitable murder of the poor family dog. And, of course, the heroine’s climactic race home to save her kids, through torrential rain (naturally), which ends at night (so much scarier!) even though she apparently set out in the morning and covered just a short distance.
   And just in case these conventions weren’t tired enough the first time around, several of them, including menacing shots of a grate that conducts ominous whispers and the occasional swarm of flies from the basement, keep getting repeated.
   An hour and a half is too much of your precious life to waste on this dreck. Run away, run away!
Rated R. Contains violence, disturbing images, language, brief sexuality and drug use.