Review of The Amityville Horror (2005) by Manny C — 13 Apr 2011

The original was so bad it makes Lucio Fulci movies look like Gone With The Wind. This is no improvement. Sure, the house looks neat, particularly at night when storms rattle it like nobody's business, causing the windows to make noise.

Or that may just be the ghosts. I didn't care. I didn't care the first time, when I saw 1979's The Amityville Horror, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, which was excruciating and tedious, despite a welcome hammed up turn from Rod Steiger as a priest.

This remake is full of showy special effects, and still based on the supposedly factual best-seller from Jay Anson about a Long Island family who move into a Dutch colonial in Amityville, and then find out their new house has a frightening history since a year earlier, in 1974, a man named Ronald DeFeo Jr.

shot his parents and four siblings as they slept, and claimed the house caused him to do it. That may be why George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) and his wife Kathy (Melissa George) get such a great deal on the place.

Kathy has three children from a previous marriage, after her first husband passed. 'There are no bad houses, just bad people,' George says, as if he's never seen a horror movie in his life.

But then he begins seeing things, and feeling unusually cold. So he starts chopping wood, carrying an axe around and displaying annoyance at his stepkids. Debuting director Andrew Douglas uses every haunted house cliche there is, like dripping blood and demon faces.

The result isn't scary, it's just tedious and busy. It's all show, which seldom works in haunted house flicks. It's what you don't see that should fry your nerves on end.