Paying to Enter Amityville Remake’s Biggest Horror

112 Ocean Avenue in Suffolk County, Long Island is an address of great mystery. In a house with eyes that seemingly peer into the very soul, no one denies that at 3:15 a.m. Ronald DeFeo, Jr. woke up on November 13, 1974 with a shotgun in his hand. No one questions that he viciously murdered his entire family while they slept peacefully with said shotgun. Everyone understands that, in his defense, he claimed to be possessed by demons living within the family’s home. These things actually happened. These things are facts.

What remains a mystery, however, is why, almost exactly one year later, George (Ryan Reynolds, Blade: Trinity) and Kathy Lutz (Melissa George, Down with Love) moved out of the very same house only 28 days after moving in. They left everything behind; clothes, food, furniture, toys; all of it left inside to collect dust and be forgotten like a bad dream. They claimed the property was possessed, an evil abode intent on claiming their lives just as it had the DeFeo’s.

Their story, called The Amityville Horror, was recounted in a best-selling novel by Jay Anson and later made into a hit movie starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder in 1979. But for all the terror and blood-curdling madness supposedly experienced by the Lutz’s, neither the book nor the film did a very good job of delivering either to an audience (New York Times bestseller list placement and box office receipts notwithstanding). Umpteen crappy, most of them straight-to-video, sequels later, any chance George and Kathy could find a majority of people willing to take either them or their story seriously were in seriously short supply.

Enter Michael Bay, MGM and Miramax/Dimension Films. Each felt the Lutz’s story was ready to be told again and that they were just the ones to do a better, more spine-tingling job then their predecessors. Fresh off his success of re-imagining (at least at the box office) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s easy to see why Bay certainly thought so. By putting that film’s writer Scott Kosar (whom also penned the even more unnerving The Machinist) and cementing idiosyncratic commercial director Andrew Douglas at the helm, it’s just as easy to understand the studios’ excitement surrounding the project, too. Throw in horror’s sudden resurgence and some genuinely unsettling trailers and this new take on The Amityville Horror has all the earmarks of a pre-summer smash.

Sorry gang, but 2005’s variation on 1979’s original is no more successful or scary than that bizarrely popular film was. It’s idiotic and chaotically slapped together, an unfocused menagerie of Grand Guignol images even the Marquis de Sade would find ponderous. Things happen without explanation, the movie using the most appalling shorthand to get itself from scene to scene. It’s pitiful (the lack of continuity throughout insulting), not so much because the story has potential (it really doesn’t) but more because audience’s already bludgeoned into seeing a litany of pathetic horror flicks (White Noise, The Boogeyman, Hide and Seek) now have one more to try and sit through.

The actors do what they can. George is especially appealing, her breakdown from hopeful mother and newlywed giddy abut owning such a valuable new home into frazzled and despondent parent terrified for her children’s safety is sublime. She’s wonderful, investing far more into her portrayal than the movie really deserves. Reynolds does what he can, but George Lutz’s descent in psychotic madness is so sudden Jack Nichlson’s somewhat similar turn in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining could actually be called restrained. As for the wondrous character actor Philip Baker Hall (In Good Company), the less said the better. Taking over the Rod Steiger priest character from the first film, this is nothing more than a paycheck role for the actor and I can only hope the money was worth it for it is plainly obvious the men behind this mess could care less that he’s in it.

To be fair, there are a couple of jumps here and there (especially a great early one involving the Lutz’s youngest son and a mirror that caused my friend to both jump and scream). For a brief while it even looks like Douglas is going to eschew blood and gore and go for more cerebral haunted house scares ala Robert Wise’s 1963 classic The Haunting. Unfortunately it doesn’t last, the director instead deciding to ape the hyperactive rat-a-tat-tat editing technique of his producer Bad Boys and Armageddon director Bay. It all culminates in a montage of George discovering 112 Ocean Avenue’s dark hidden secrets, and excuse me if all the changing shutter speeds, jump cuts and  spurting blood did little more than give me a blinding headache.

So, did the horrible events depicted in The Amityville Horror really happen? Or, was it all just a fevered nightmare sprung forth from out of the Lutz family’s vivid imagination? While I don’t pretend to know, based on what’s going on here I also don’t pretend to care. In fact, the only truly scary thought I can think of is that people will actually pay to see this drivel. Of all the horrors this remake could ever have hoped to put forth, this one just might be the most innervating of them all.

Film Rating: ê  (out of 4)