Reel Talk: The Amityville Horror
By Audrey Rock
Transcript Bulletin Movie Critic


"The Amityville Horror" starts off on the wrong foot with me by proclaiming itself to be “based on a true story.” To say that’s debatable is an understatement.

"The Amityville Horror" was first the supposedly true story of the Lutz family being driven from a haunted house in the 1970’s, shortly after the entire DeFeo family were murdered there in their sleep. Then it was a best selling book, then it was a 1979 movie starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. Now it’s a bad horror remake.

The mythology of the old house was a runaway commercial success. And then one day, a lawyer involved with the Lutz family reportedly admitted that the Lutz’s couldn’t afford their expensive new house and needed an excuse to get out of the mortgage quickly. Conveniently, some grisly murders had occurred in the house just a year earlier, so they concocted a wild ghost story.

In this wild ghost story, the Lutz’s had fled with their children after only 28 days in the house, so terrorized that they never returned to claim their possessions. Only there were also hilarious accusations that the Lutz’s had come back the very next day to hold a garage sale.

Whatever the truth is, it’s interesting that the makers of this movie are pretending like there’s never been a suggestion that the story could have been nothing but a major hoax. But die-hard fans seem to have conveniently ignored the challenges to Amityville’s veracity. And apparently there’s still enough belief in the famous haunting, or at least enough interest in the possibility, that another movie was justified.

Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George star as George and Kathy Lutz in this version, who have just picked out their dream home in Amityville. It takes exactly a few hours for George to start getting sickly and cold, and for their little girl to start playing with an ugly little ghost with a fresh bullet hole in her head.

It’s not a rule that you have to be understated with ghost stories, but you should probably at least try. This gory mess leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. And I mean nothing. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the chilling shadow of a ghost flit through a hallway, and have to wonder what horrors might be lurking? We don’t ever get to wonder what’s going on in this house.

Ryan Reynolds, who was the best part of the campy "Blade: Trinity" is funny also in "The Amityville Horror," but he wasn’t trying to be this time. Shame on director Andrew Douglas for making a frighteningly abusive father and husband funny. You have to be really sloppy to be able to make an abusive father funny.

But that’s what this remake is all about: sloppily going through the motions. We’ve been to Amityville before. You have to give us a reason to go back.

Grade: C-