Amityville Horror, The

Remakes have gotten a bad wrap recently. Not that all of the criticism is unfounded, rather, much of it is rather well deserved. There are remakes left and right being slated for movies that are better off left untouched. Some have worked (with Dawn of the Dead being an unbelievably fun movie all things considered), while others have not (Psycho, TCM anyone?). All things considered though, as many bad remakes as there are out there, more than a few have been amazing. John Carpenter's The Thing remains one of the scariest movies ever made. The Blob '88 transplanted the fun of the 50's original to an 80's mentality with great results. And honestly, what more could be said about Cronenberg's take on The Fly? I'll argue until the day I die that Jeff Goldblum should've at least gotten an Oscar nomination for his part, but that is neither here nor there. In short, remakes can be great if the original source material warrants enough room for change and improvement.

So, given a film as mediocre as the original Amityville Horror, there was plenty of room for improvement. Given a big budget and a push from the man who got The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake off the ground, that should have left plenty of room to make a fairly decent remake. Does it succeed in that regard? Yes. Is it a good movie? Well, not so much.

November 14, 1974.
Amityville, Long Island. Butch DeFeo murders his entire family in their sleep with a rifle. Flash forward one year, and 112 Ocean Avenue is up for sale. George and Kathy Lutz move in with her three children from a previous marriage. They only lasted 28 days before fleeing in terror. When released, all the advertisements blasted the phrase "Inspired by True Events". Indeed, for the longest time people have believed the claims of the Lutz family, even though in recent times it has been revealed that all their accusations of ghosts and possessions and demons in the house were all lies. I don't know if this really counts as false advertising, but for the sake of the audience, they'd have to be pretty dim to consider any of the things in this movie real.

This "re-imagining" contains enough clichés from modern horror lore to keep it familiar to mainstream audiences, throws in some random made up folklore for good measure, and to top things off adds in random shock scares that neither really shock or scare. There's the creepy little girl, the father figure slowly being driven insane by his family, numerous almost-drowning scenes, and of course a secret room hidden under the house that was once used for torturing Indians. I mean, every house needs one of those, right? With the exception of the latter (which is honestly unnecessary and comes out of nowhere at the last minute), all of these have been seen before and been executed much, much better. The jump scares feature "spirits" of the house appearing out of nowhere and looking delightfully rotted, yet are never fully explained. As well, the main antagonist, the ghost that we are supposed to fear most and is supposed to be the coolest looking of the bunch is introduced in the last ten minutes and seems more like a superfluous add-on than anything else. Considering a general lack of atmosphere and tension and the suspension of disbelief required for the "Inspired by True Events" slogan to have any weight, the movie doesn't have too much going for it.

This is not to say it's totally without hope. The acting is above par for a horror remake, and you can tell that everyone put their best effort into it. Ryan Reynolds' descent into madness is very well done, as are his wife's best efforts to hold everything together when everything seems to be hitting the fan. The scare moments that do work, work very well. The babysitter getting locked in the closet is suitably chilling. Nothing overly special, but still nicely done.

It loses the silliness and absurdity that seemed to permeate the original, but replaces it with even more clichés and a massive amount of suspension of disbelief. It succeeds in improving upon the original, yet as a movie provides lukewarm results at best.