The Amityville Horror (2005)
Directed by Andrew Douglas
George Lutz, his wife Kathy, and their three children have just moved into a beautiful, and improbably cheap, Dutch colonial mansion nestled in the sleepy coastal town of Amityville, Long Island. However, their dream home is concealing a horrific past and soon each member of the Lutz family is plagued with increasingly strange and violent visions and impulses.
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That The Amityville Horror is generally considered a classic horror flick is somewhat baffling, though it certainly looks a whole lot better when compared to its sequels.
They play a couple named George and Kathy Lutz, whose experiences inspired a bestselling book named, of course, "The Amityville Horror," and who moved out of their house and left their furniture behind and moved to San Diego, fulfilling all of our dreams.
Like The Exorcist and The Omen, the real baddie of The Amityville Horror is Satan, who drove a boy to kill his parents and four siblings in cold blood, and whose wicked spirit, one year later, possesses new occupant George Lutz (James Brolin) and convinces him to do away with his new wife Kathy (Margot Kidder) and her three annoying kids.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, The Amityville Horror is pure grade B Wisconsin cheese, and for the 17-24 demographic, it works like a charm.
Whereas the '79 Horror primarily stole from The Exorcist (complete with a put-upon priest played by Rod Steiger), the 2005 model, with an additional 26 years to draw from, manages to additionally rip off The Shining, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense and The Ring — heck, this movie is so shameless, there's probably a swipe from Scooby Doo On Zombie Island as well.
The secondary lessons are that remakes of inessential 1970s horror movies are doubly inessential, that ripping off "The Shining" adds insult to injury and that Ryan Reynolds is no Jack Nicholson.
The new Amityville owes a great deal to both The Exorcist and The Shining but lacks both Friedkin's attention to detail and Kubrick's supreme patience.
The fairly restrained first half of the film is quite faithful to the original, but it soon turns into "The Shining," complete with splatters of blood and over-the-top histrionics.
But like The Shining , the sinister atmosphere comes from watching a seemingly normal, happy man transformed into a crazed homicidal maniac, urged on by a place with a malevolent history.
Faster than you can say "boo," blood is pouring out of the light fixtures, arms are coming out of walls, the kids are having ghostly visitations, and George turns into Jack Nicholson in "The Shining," chasing the rest of the family around with a grin and an ax.
Shortly thereafter, American International Pictures adapted Jay Anson's book to the big screen, and it was successful enough to spawn two more Amityville films that were released in theaters: Amityville II: The Possession (1982) was a highly fictionalized prequel about the De Feo massacre, while Amityville 3-D (1983) was a completely fictionalized sequel.
But when it comes time to put a fresh spin on things, the filmmakers have zero ideas and instead blatantly borrow from "The Ring," "The Sixth Sense" and Nine Inch Nails videos.
Whereas the '79 Horror primarily stole from The Exorcist (complete with a put-upon priest played by Rod Steiger), the 2005 model, with an additional 26 years to draw from, manages to additionally rip off The Shining, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense and The Ring — heck, this movie is so shameless, there's probably a swipe from Scooby Doo On Zombie Island as well.
Many of the special and makeup effects are cribbed from Asian horror ("The Grudge's" ghosts, "The Ring's" eerie photographs) and a scene where young Michael (Jimmy Bennett, "Hostage") visits the bathroom in the middle of the night parallels a scene in "The Sixth Sense."
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Whereas the '79 Horror primarily stole from The Exorcist (complete with a put-upon priest played by Rod Steiger), the 2005 model, with an additional 26 years to draw from, manages to additionally rip off The Shining, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense and The Ring — heck, this movie is so shameless, there's probably a swipe from Scooby Doo On Zombie Island as well.
The new Amityville owes a great deal to both The Exorcist and The Shining but lacks both Friedkin's attention to detail and Kubrick's supreme patience.
The original was directed by Stuart Rosenberg, a competent journeyman with two great films to his credit (Cool Hand Luke and The Pope of Greenwich Village), and at least the first film tried to follow the book.
But casual horror fans would hardly want an endless "Star Wars"-like scroll full of caveats, maybes and perhapses to slog down the thrills.
That said, the assertion that this cliché-ridden, special effects-heavy movie is true is absurd; it’s like saying that Star Wars was based on actual historical events simply because a long time ago there really was a galaxy far, far away.
What was the tale of the Lutz family, who moved into a deal-of-the-century home only to find that it's pervaded by evil spirits, now finds patriarch George (a convincingly charismatic-to-psychopathic Ryan Reynolds) being possessed not by the devil but by Bill Paxton in "Frailty."
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The first-time director is British video and commercial veteran Andrew Douglas, but the creative force here is Bay, a director ("The Rock," "Pearl Harbor") turned producer who also recently remade "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in his distinctively sense-battering style.
Michael Bay, one of those Son-of-Satan filmmakers who is doing his best to turn the cinematic artform into one big McMovie, occasionally takes a break from directing crap like Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor to produce slicked up remakes of 70s horror classics.
The first-time director is British video and commercial veteran Andrew Douglas, but the creative force here is Bay, a director ("The Rock," "Pearl Harbor") turned producer who also recently remade "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in his distinctively sense-battering style.