Review: The Amityville Horror (2005)

I've always wondered why filmmakers bother to remake movies that were perfectly fine in the first place. I mean, did we really need a new version of Psycho? Another Manchurian Candidate? More Planet of the Apes? No, no and no. (And we still have The Pink Panther and King Kong to look forward to.) Why waste time remaking good movies when there are so many bad movies with at least the germ of a good idea at their cores that are more worthy candidates for "re-envisioning"?

The current popularity of horror films, particularly ghost stories, would seem to position The Amityville Horror as a promising candidate for such a revisit. The original Amityville, based on the "nonfiction" best-seller by Jay Anson (the truthfulness of which has been at the very least disputed, if not entirely dismissed as fiction), starred James Brolin and Margot Kidder as George and Kathy Lutz, a young couple who move their family into a riverside property in Amityville, New York, only to move out 28 days later after experiencing numerous flavors of paranormal nightmare, like plagues of flies, blood flowing out of the walls and possession. Despite hysterical performances by Brolin, Kidder and Rod Steiger and overall lousy reviews, the 1979 version of Amityville made millions of dollars and generated seven follow-ups, most of which related to the original in name and basic concept alone.

Unfortunately, producer Michael Bay (who also produced the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and director Andrew Douglas squander the opportunity to pump new life into the franchise by going through many of the same motions as the original, only with younger stars and a few bits lifted from more recent thrillers like The Ring and The Grudge (themselves both remakes) thrown in.

Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George take over as George and Kathy, who go looking for a house for themselves and Kathy's three precocious moppets from her previous marriage (her first husband died) and find this lovely riverfront property in Amityville for dirt cheap--maybe because the previous tenants, the Defeos, were murdered in their sleep with a shotgun by Ronald Defeo, who claimed that voices in his head told him to do it. Uh oh.

George and Kathy buy the place anyway, and weird ensues almost immediately. George becomes remarkably short-tempered and just can't seem to get warm no matter what he does, so he essentially moves into the basement to be closer to the furnace. The youngest Lutz, Chelsea, starts talking to a not-so-imaginary friend named Jodie, who isn't a pig with red eyes this time around, but a spectral little girl with flowing black hair (just like Samara from The Ring) who urges Chelsea to jump off the roof. Kathy calls in a priest (Philip Baker Hall) to bless the house, but the house tells him to "GET OUT!" and, very sensibly, he does, leaving the Lutzes to do battle with the evil spirits on their own.

Reynolds does his best to convey George's confusion over his own behavior and gets some nice, creepy moments, like when George makes Kathy's oldest son hold the firewood while he cleaves in half with an axe or when he screws into the woodwork at random. By the end of the movie, though, when Reynolds comes off as little more than a junior Jack Torrance with better abs and more facial hair. Melissa George doesn't fare as much better as Kathy, wearing the same wide-eyed, appalled facial expression most of the time and sporting some of the most frightening eyebrows this side of Mommie Dearest.

Director Douglas keeps things moving at an brisk pace, but that rapid movement also works against this new Amityville. George Lutz's descent into madness/possession isn't so much a steady decline as it is a straight drop--the boxes have barely been unpacked when George starts acting wacky, stripping the movie of any opportunity to build suspense. And no matter how many ominous tracking shots of the house we get (trust me, there are many) or "surprise" appearances by Jodie are thrown at the audience, the atmosphere of dread and foreboding that Douglas and screenwriter Scott Kosar are striving for never takes hold.

By the time Hall gets knocked on his ass by a very unconvincing swarm of computer-generated flies, it's hard to stifle the laughter anymore. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the reaction Bay, Douglas and Kosar were going for.