Overall Rating
  Awesome: 12.08%
Worth A Look: 10.07%
Average: 30.2%
Pretty Bad: 16.78%
Total Crap: 30.87%
12 reviews, 77 user ratings
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| Amityville Horror, The (2005) |
by Rob Gonsalves
"These assholes can't even do a good remake of a bad movie."
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According to George Lutz, who along with his (now-deceased) wife Kathy and his three stepchildren spent 28 days in a Long Island house before fleeing into the night, you shouldn't trust anyone's account of that month except his own.Jay Anson's book The Amityville Horror and the 1979 movie it inspired, Lutz said, were filled with exaggerations and outright lies; and the 2005 remake, he charged when it came out, is no more "based on a true story" than the original film. Other people, over the years, have called Lutz's entire story a hoax, maintaining that there was no haunting. Who to believe? Certainly not the 2005 version, which I found flatly unbelievable even by horror-film standards.
It's nice that Hollywood has taken my advice and remade a bad movie (the 1979 version hasn't aged well) instead of tarnishing the memory of good movies. But producer Michael Bay and screenwriter Scott Kosar, who previously took a giant dump on the horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre by giving it an uncalled-for do-over, don't even improve on the clumsy first film. The remake does get one thing right: Ryan Reynolds as George Lutz has more humor and humanity than big, bearded James Brolin did. But George's transformation from healthy stepdad to axe-fondling psycho happens too abruptly -- 89 minutes don't leave much time for a plausible, gradual personality change. And because this movie takes George much further than either the book or the previous film did -- to the point of active murderous intent -- we wonder why Kathy (Melissa George) doesn't run out on him long before the tipping point.
The Lutzes move into the huge Long Island house despite the murders that happened there the previous year, because a house this good and this cheap doesn't come along every day. We only get an intermittent sense, though, that their chief reason for sticking with the house is financial and not, say, stupid. Stephen King, writing about the 1979 film in Danse Macabre, posited the real secret of the movie's success: it was about money troubles. Toilets overflowing with muck, doors and windows that stick -- these are common householder frustrations. King also singled out the scene where James Brolin searches in vain for the money his brother-in-law set aside for his wedding caterer but then lost (the house apparently ate it). Brolin and Margot Kidder were an older, mid-thirtyish couple; Reynolds and George come off like twentysomethings who could rebound easily from financial setbacks.
Instead, the movie adds layers onto the derangement of the family. As in the original, Kathy's young daughter makes a new friend in Jodie, a spirit haunting the house. In 1979, Jodie was a pig-like demon-thing. Now, Jodie is like Samara from The Ring, and in a scene typical of the movie's emphasis on the ugly over the truly scary, the ghost-girl forces a hapless babysitter to stick a finger inside the bullet hole in her head. A possessed, axe-wielding George meets up with the family dog, with bad results for the dog (a development the real Lutz is reportedly disgusted with). A wall in the cellar leads to a space where a demented reverend used to torture Indians to death. Like the Chainsaw remake, Amityville '05 is less frightening than just unpleasant.
In the end, the legend of the Amityville house boils down to the fracture of the family: in the house's original murders, the teenage Ronald Defeo shotgunned his entire family, and here George chases his stepkids around with an axe like a bargain-basement Jack Torrance in The Shining. The subtext here is that your stepdad resents you, and will kill you and your mom.It's not for kids, but of course that doesn't stop some people. At the screening I attended, I saw a moronic couple and their four-year-old daughter sitting a few rows down. On the way out, the "mother" complimented the little girl on not screaming during the movie: "Pretty good for a four-year-old." Social conservatives like to crusade against corruptive entertainment, but what good does that do if "parents" blithely take their toddlers to crap like this? Why not just chase your four-year-old around with an axe and save the ticket money?
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11925&reviewer=416
originally posted: 12/24/06 13:34:41
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Horror Remakes: For more in the Horror Remakes series, click here.
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USA
15-Apr-2005 (R)
DVD: 04-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Apr-2005
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