THE AMITYVILLE HORROR Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
MGM
Grade: C+
Directed by: Andrew Douglas
Written by: Scott Kosar, based on Sandor Stern’s screenplay, novel by Jay Anson
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Philip Baker Hall, Jimmy
Bennett, Jesse James, Chloe Moretz
Screened at:AMC., NYC, 4/14/05 If you think that the ‘burbs are the best place to bring up kids, think again. When your property is bereft of close neighbors to keep a watch out for them, and that residences in remote areas can be so quiet that you may begin to hear voices, watch out. If you’re not convinced that you should live in big cities where there enough distractions to drown out those inner voices, maybe you never saw “In Cold Blood,” based on two young killers, their motives and eventual arrest after slaughtering an innocent family. And given the yawn factor of the first “Amityville Horror,” directed by Stuart Rosenberg who had a fondness for schtick, you may still look fondly on living away from metropolitan centers. Andrew Douglas’s new “The Amityville Horror, “ scripted by Scott Kosar, in turn based on Sandor Stern’s screenplay and adapted from Jay Anson’s novel, will not scare you away either. Despite some positive attributes, Douglas pumps up the soundtrack with Steve Jablonsky’s dissonant music as if to admit that the visuals, the things that go bump in the night, and the principal character’s emerging psychotic break, are not enough to stand on their own for either scares or creepiness. Nor does the hackneyed opening--a dark and stormy night-- set the right tone for an audience that just might prefer to look about, size up the neighbors, check out the man and woman and their three kids. To be fair, Douglas is not wrong to spend a couple of minutes at the opening summing up what happened a year back–a true story by the way–during the wee hours of the morning in the mid-seventies when Ron DeFeo, hearing voices, shoots and kills six members of his family. (I believe the real De Feo is serving multiple life sentences for the mass murder.) The spooky house on Ocean Avenue in New York’s Suffolk
County (actually filmed at a Victorian digs in rural Wisconsin) is the principal character. We’re introduced to its new paterfamilias, George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds), a contractor who is persuaded by his young wife Kathy (Melissa George) to snap up the 120-year-old place, neither knowing its tragic history nor caring about its locus for some serious criminal activity the year before. They have three kids, the whiny 12-year-old Billy Lutz (Jesse James), who misses his real daddy and doesn’t take well to his pumped-up stepfather, and two generic sibs, Michael (Jimmy Bennett) and Chelsea (Chloe Grace Moretz). The first sign of trouble occurs when young Chelsea, the only one so far who sees dead people, gets a look at the ghostly Lisa (Rachel Nichols), who sports a hole in her forehead thanks a large bullet from her wacko older brother’s rifle. There’s really nothing new under the Amityville sun. The cliches include shadowy figures who zip past the living human beings too fast for them to get a real look; the satanic images that flash by in one kid’s face; the sad look of poor Lisa, who likes to show up for the new residents at 3:15 on most mornings to commemorate the moment she was killed by Ron De Feo. “The Amityville Horror” thankfully downplays the spooks–while on the other hand blasting the music so loud that some dialogue gets lost–while concentrating on the growing psychosis of George Lutz, who has seen one poltergeist too many and is going off the deep end like “The Shining”’s Jack Nicholson. Axe in hand, he demands that his rebellious, adopted son hold wood between his two hands while he fells the logs, one by one, for heating the house. But heat could be the last thing needed at 112 Ocean Avenue: just watch Philip Baker Hall in the role of the town’s priest trying to perform an exorcism on the second floor only to have his holy water turned into steam. To see what could be done with this sort of plot, without booming music to tell you how to feel, check the DVD of Joseph Ruben’s 1987 film “The Stepfather,” about a psycho who marries widows, later erupting into violence. Rated R. 89 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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