Overall Rating
  Awesome: 11.92%
Worth A Look: 9.93%
Average: 29.8%
Pretty Bad: 16.56%
Total Crap: 31.79%
12 reviews, 79 user ratings
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| Amityville Horror, The (2005) |
by Doug Bentin
"Okay, it’s scarier than the original, but 'Bambi' was, too."
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Like ghosts, your neighbor’s cat, and bad Supreme Court appointments, some things won’t go away. Case in point: just when we thought it was safe to go back to the theater to see haunted house movies, along comes this do-over “Amityville Horror.”If you came in late, here’s our story so far. George and Kathy Lutz (Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George), a young couple with three kids—George is the step-dad—move into a Dutch colonial house on a lake in Amityville, NY. Hmmm. Waterfront property. Big house. Big yard. Cheap asking price. What could be wrong? How about . . . peeling paint. Nasty, drippy stains on the ceilings. Spooky noises. A Realtor who refuses to accompany prospective buyers into the basement. And those damn windows that make the place look like a carved pumpkin.
Is this a movie about upwardly mobile thirtysomethings who are so desperate to sink their teeth into the American dream that they’re willing to turn a blind nose to that stench emanating from the State of Denmark? You wish.
No, it’s just a spook house flick, and a badly constructed one at that.
It starts off well, with subtlety and even something that might be wit, but as soon as we get into the second reel, the wheels drop off. Introducing that Realtor (Annabel Armour) and then letting her disappear makes sense, but other characters enter, ones we expect might have some impact later in the picture, and they also just go “poof.”
For instance, a babysitter (Rachel Nichols) struts her way into the house just long enough to terrify the kids by telling them about the mass murder that occurred there a year before they moved in (“I suck at babysitting,” she admits anachronistically for the 1970s).
She scares the bejeezus out of them, and then the compliment is returned by the ghost of one of the victims when it says “Boo” to her, and then, after being wheeled away by paramedics, nada. The cops don’t even investigate what happened to her. Her parents don’t demonstrate any interest either.
And remember that this happens in a house that is locally reputed to be, at the very least, haunted. The aftermath, or lack of same, of the babysitter scene is just bad, bad filmmaking.
A priest (Philip Baker Hall) is called in to check the place over. He runs screaming to his car, but does nothing else about a house that has more demons than the Everglades has mosquitoes. He should have called the priest from “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and they could have held “Exorcism-pa-looza.” Bring in Alice Cooper to provide the music. Fun for the entire family.
I’ve pretty much reached the point at which I no longer care if Hollywood’s idea of a new horror movie is doing some body work on an older model, but I do still get miffed when directors and writers like Andrew Douglas and Scott Kosar go into their projects assuming that audiences are too disinterested in the end product to care whether or not it makes sense. Start from logic and then break it down realistically. I can go for that.
In this picture, George Lutz falls under the house’s spell. Scenes in which we see him slipping away are spooky enough, but when he goes all Jack Nicholson and grabs up an axe, all I see is a faded carbon copy. Even then, if you’re going to be inspired by something like “The Shining,” remember that a moment most people seem to remember as being among the creepiest was when we saw the text Jack had been typing so furiously. Going crazy is scarier than being crazy. Stick with that.
And just drop all the “based on a true story” crap. We’ve all known for decades now that this hodgepodge of haunted house clichés was a hoax.In the Trivia section for this flick in the Internet Movie Database we see that “This movie was not screened for the critics.” Hell, it was barely screened for audiences.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11925&reviewer=405
originally posted: 10/14/05 00:47:31
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USA
15-Apr-2005 (R)
DVD: 04-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Apr-2005
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