04.18.05
Review: The Amityville Horror (2005)
When I first moved to New Jersey, I lived in this really old, tiny house that resembled the Blair Witch house. It had a dank, creepy basement, creaky floors, and sat on the side of a highway at the base of the Watchung mountains. One night, I was lying alone in my bedroom watching the original Amityville Horror, and it scared the living crap out of me. It was subtle, mysterious, and made me realize that God only knows what might have happened in the house that I was conveniently living in.
This past Friday, curiosity led me to the movies to see the MGM remake of Amityville because I found the original to be so enthralling. What I ended up seeing was a completely different movie.
The familiar plotline was there. Ronald “Buck” DeFeo kills his entire family while they are sleeping and claims that Satan made him do it. A year later, the Lutz family buys the house, and terror ensues. That’s really where the similarity ends.
The remake of the movie takes a lot of creative liberty in retelling the story. For instance, in the original we never see the ghosts of the family that was killed. In the remake, they play an active role in scaring the crap out of everyone. The storyline in the new movie revolves around a reverend who tortured and killed a bunch of natives in the basement of the house — and it only gets weirder.
I found the remake to be pretty damned scary (*much* scarier than The Ring 2), but what didn’t impress me was how hard they had to try to deliver those jolting moments. The original was scary purely in nuance and was almost completely devoid of any special effects. Perhaps the glitzy gore and special effects in the retold version of Amityville is a sad testament to how hard it is to impress audiences today, and should remind us that once upon a time, we didn’t need fast-moving corpses having seizures to become truly frightened.
My rating: B+
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