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DVD : The Amityville Horror (Widescreen Special Edition) |
- Almost perfect!I have to say that I didn't watch the original "Amityville Horror" movie, but when I watched this it totally freaked me out. It has a lot of suspense and terrifying scenes.
The one complain I have about this movie is that the actor they chose to play George Lutz looks like the other actor they chose to play Ronald DeFeo that appeared in the beginning of the movie a lot! For some seconds I was confused and I thought that Lutz was DeFeo.
The special effects are really, really good, and the make up in the actors is very well done, like Jodie's make up when she's already dead, or the scene when Chelsea walks on the house's roof...those are very good and intense scenes.
I watched this expecting something and I wasn't dissapointed at all, when I watched it. I can recommend it to everybody who loves horror and suspense.
Rating:
- More Historically Accurate than the originalI wouldn't call this remake exactly a horror flick, it was more of an interpretation of the real life story the original Amityville Horror was based on with a few scary scenes added to pay homage to the original film.
This movie is really about the secret tension that exists in most families and how at times it can get taken to far. A man moves into a house with his new wife and her children from previous sex and they all seem to get along until a demonic presence in the house possesses him and encourages him to kill them all. The same spirit that alledgedly possessed a man some years earlier and caused him to kill his siblings and parents in the same house this new family now lives in. In real life, the jury didn't buy that story, but who knows? In real estate that say that location is everything, so if any of you are thinking about buying a place, don't buy a house built on the gateway to Hell. It's a bad investment.
Rating:
- Wasted potential.[Note: review abridged for length requirements.]
The Amityville Horror (Andrew Douglas, 2005)
First, let's get this out of the way. The "true story" upon which The Amityville Horror is based is that the Lutzes bought a house they couldn't afford, and were drowning in debt. Given the house's history, they concocted the haunted-house story in order to get out from under the payments. This is something that the Lutzes came clean about ten years ago; how Douglas can get away with "based on a true story" is utterly beyond me. (Though in his defense, the extras do make it seem like he really bought the story hook, line, and sinker; obviously, the Lutzes' confession was not nearly as widely popularized as the original story.) I'm surprised no one's filed a class action lawsuit against the film's crew for representing it as true. (Even IMDB recognizes the hoax; the original film is listed bas based on Jay Anson's book, while the new one lists it as based on Jay Anson's novel.) James Frey is small potatoes, in comparison.
That aside, comparing this to the original Stuart Rosenberg flick from 1979 is almost a painful experience. Both films are mediocre examples of filmmaking, but whereas Rosenberg's movie is fully realized in its mediocrity, Douglas has crafted a film that had almost limitless potential, and he threw most of it away piece by ugly piece.
The one thing Douglas did right was toss out most of the conventions people were expecting from the '79 movie-- the infamous flies show up in only one scene, and pig-Jodie (the "glowing red eyes outside the window" shot the original made so famous) is nowhere to be found. While it is almost always the case that suggesting the demon is scarier than showing the demon, the version of Jodie found in this movie is far, far creepier than a pair of floating red eyes and a vague, pig-looking shadow. Also, the writers added a few touches that had the potential to make the story more interesting, such as the tentative relationship between George and the kids. The best thing they could have done would have been to dump the original script altogether and simply make a haunted-house flick that wore its allegiance to the '79 film on its sleeve. To his credit, it seems like twisted, brilliant screenwriter Scott Kosar (El Maquinista) attempted to do just that, but got hamstrung.
For those who have been living in a cave for the past thirty years, the story, as originally told by the Lutzes: George and Kathy Lutz (here portrayed by Blade Trinity's Ryan Reynolds and Down with Love's Melissa George, respectively) bought a house in Amityville, New York, in 1975. Like all houses for which you get an incredible, deal, it's haunted. In this case, the year before, Ronald DeFeo, the son of the previous owner, had murdered the rest of his family in the house, claiming he'd heard voices telling him to do it. When George, Kathy, and family moved in, the same voices haunted them (and a priest they bring in to bless the house, whose role, according to the Catholic Diocese of Rockville Center, is "completely exaggerated" in the novel) until, twenty-eight days later, they fled, leaving all their personal possessions, never to return to the house.
The acting is actually rather credible. Reynolds overacts a tad, as is his wont, but just a tad; no scenery-chewing here except for Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia), who plays the priest role to the hilt. George is great, and the adult actors are rounded out perfectly by a star turn from Rachel Nichols, of the underrated, short-lived TV series The Inside, as a drugged-out babysitter who tells the kids about the murders.
The kids themselves were conventionally cast-- no taking chances on unknowns here-- and are conventional actors. Chelsea (soon to be seen in Zombies, J. S. Cardone's new flick) is your basic overdose of the cute, while Jimmy Bennett (Firewall) and Jesse James (The Butterfly Effect) go through their paces, each demonstrating the ability to cry on command.
The problem with all this acting talent, which ranges from competent to surprisingly good, is that it's all hung on a framework that's so scrappy it can't even get the hallowed Hollywood tradition of the emotional shortcut right. The film's severely abbreviated length-- eighty-nine minutes-- could be written off as the culprit, but the deleted scenes don't show that there was any effort whatsoever to try and trace the emotions from point A to point B in the script. George goes from being kind, loving dad (which the script spent a good deal of time setting up, mind you, making the first moments of the film intensely boring) to raging jerk in the space of a heartbeat, then spends the rest of the movie rapid-cycling. This is one place the original film works much better than this one; James Brolin's gradual descent into madness plays, whereas Reynolds has a precipice instead of a descent. The funny thing is, he's still got twenty-seven days after he jumps off said precipice to hang around and be useless.
More frustrating, the emotional scraps hang on the framework of a really good plot. Once you get about halfway into the film, the changes made to the original story start coming through, and they whip it into much better shape. There's a good deal more sense to be made out of everything, and one minor twist made to the DeFeo story ties everything together with brilliant economy. Again, construct all this on a different framework and give your actors real parts to work with, and you potentially have the best American horror flick of the past ten or fifteen years. Instead, something happened. I don't know what.
The end result is a mediocre film that could have been great. **
Rating:
- Predictable Plot...The Amityville Horror--a remake of the 1979 movie. I have not watched any of the Amityville movies before but when watching it, I felt like watching "Shining"....Predicitable plot... may be it is a true story it couldn't be too rediculous and my wife did enjoy it with a couple scare scenes 3 out of 5.
Rating:
- The Haunted House Story You Have Heard Before: Fast-Paced and Reasonable What you see in `The Amityville Horror' is not suspense; it is a chain of shocks. One good thing about the remake of the hit film `The Amityville Horror' (which spawned countless sequels, one being 3D with then unknown Meg Ryan) is that it is never boring. While you are well aware that the film lacks originality, something always happens every five minutes, accompanied with loud soundtrack and occasional scares. Another is that the film (90 minutes) is much shorter than the 1979 original by more than 20 minutes. Surely the hectic pace of the story is what you can expect from the co-producer Michael Bay.
[HOUSES DON'T KILL PEOPLE] This eternally popular `haunted house' theme needs no explanation. The Lutz Family buys an old house which is suspiciously cheap. And it turns out that another family is killed by one demented brother only one year ago. And in a month George and Kathy Lutz realize that they made a big mistake.
What a big mistake. They didn't give much thought about purchasing a house in which horrible murders were committed. But George (Ryan Reynolds) goes, `Houses don't kill people; people kill people.' These words sound very familiar, but never mind. The point is, Kathy (Melissa George) soon finds out that her lovely daughter Chelsea starts to act strangely, talking to an imaginary friend. Add to that, Chelsea's baby-sitter is mentally shocked and is sent to hospital after unwisely staying where she shouldn't (as these people always do).
These set-pieces keep coming to us like avalanche of horrors. At first it is pretty scary, but as the film goes on, probably most of the audiences would be able to anticipate the timing of the next shock. I don't say the film is scare-less, but these scares gradually get easier and cheaper. The brief explanations about the site of the house belong to the gory scenes of `The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.' Philip Baker Hall (as a cameo) plays a priest, but his experience in the house is already known to those who have seen the original. The difference is that the remake does it with much bigger and louder effects.
`The Amityville Horror' is not awful as some critics imply. The performances of the actors, especially those of the child actors are very good, and because of the slick pace of the film it gets seldom dull and boring. But at the same time, you must be thinking to yourself about the following two questions: `Why did they buy the house?" and "Why don't they run away from the house?" You are right, but stop thinking about them and only then you find it moderately entertaining.
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