Horrorfest 2010: The Amityville Horror

Boy, THE AMITYVILLE HORROR sucks.

It's the fairly well-known story of a young family, the Lutzes (dad James Brolin and mom Margot Kidder) who move into a house in Amityville, Long Island with their three kids. The movie opens with flashbacks to a brutal murder that occurred in the house a little over a year before the Lutzes moved in. Seems the father of the family living there took a shotgun to everyone in the house. So, it isn't long before weird stuff starts happening and the Lutzes decide the place is haunted.

The first red flag is that the movie is marketed as a true story. I mean, it's based on a book called "The Amityville Horror: A True Story." But this isn't like BLAIR WITCH or PARANORMAL ACTIVITY where the marketing eventually ends and the fiction begins. No, there's actually a George and Kathy Lutz out there, they actually lived in a house in Amityville, and they actually claim it was haunted. They still do, to this day.

The problem with all this is that ghosts are pretend. So, it can't be a true story. Whether the Lutzes are liars or honestly believe in ghosts, they're still wrong. There goes the premise of the movie. A more interesting movie might have been about the aftermath of the so-called haunting. How did this get from a house in Amityville to the big screen? I want to see the Lutzes pitching this one in Hollywood. Now, that would be a story.

Instead, we get a series of events that aren't even that freaky. I don't get it. It's kind of like in THE OMEN where Biblical prophecies are reduced to boring politics and economics. Your premise is the house is haunted -- why not make it scary and weird and fantastic? I guess the thought process might be that the more mundane the so-called haunting is, the more believable it is? Well, sure, I guess the house being cold is believable, and doors slamming on their own is believable, and a swarm of flies is believable, and the fact that the windows on the outside of the house resemble glaring eyes is believable (if a little heavy handed). But we're asked to believe a ghost is doing these things. And that seems to be just a little bit of a stretch.

What would be believable is if a ghost walked across the front room and the whole family saw it happen. See, what makes better movies like POLTERGEIST scary is the fact that the viewer has proof that this stuff is definitely going on in the fictional world of the movie. The viewer buys into what the movie is saying and believes it. Instead, when the toilets back up and that's supposed to be ghost evidence, the viewer thinks, "Bullshit."

Another thing that would make this movie more believable would be if we could relate to the characters a little more. That's another thing POLTERGEIST gets right -- it's also about a haunted house, and deals with a suburban mom and dad with kids. But you get to know the family. They have three dimensional personalities. They're likable. They deal with fantastic and weird situations the way you might think a real person would. They have likes and dislikes and habits, the house looks lived in, the neighborhood appears to have other people in it. It's the little stuff like that that connects an audience. If they audience isn't connected, they're not going to buy anything you try to sell them.

Perhaps worst of all, the movie is boring. It was hard to keep my eyes open during this one. That's even with constant dog barking, thunder crashes, and priests screaming at the top of their lungs. I took a break watching the movie last night and watched the last half hour today and STILL started to fall asleep, and that was during the supposedly thrilling climax.

The movie was a huge hit and has spawned an entire franchise, so it must have done something right, I guess. Was there anything I liked? The score was good, I guess. Before the climax kicks in, Margot Kidder does her damnedest to rise above the material by acting human when the script seems to have been written by someone who has never met a human before. James Brolin has a killer head of hair and a sweet beard. The first scare, where a disembodied voice hisses, "GET OUT!" at a visiting priest is legitimately creepy.

Speaking of priests, why are movies like this always crawling with Catholics? I guess because they're all ripping off THE EXORCIST. This one has no less than four priests screaming at each other, at heaven, at whatever, trying to get to the bottom of the ghost thing. THE OMEN was full of them, too. How come no one ever goes to a Protestant pastor or a Rabbi for this stuff? Or an exterminator. If I had flies all over the place I'd call the exterminator. Or, the plumber, for the toilet.

Speaking of plumbers, this flick kind of reminded me of that "reality" show GHOST HUNTERS where plumbers by day become paranormal investigators by night, responding to distress calls from haunted houses and filming their "skeptical," "scientific" investigations. That show also relies heavily on stuff like cold spots, sounds of the house settling and doors moving on their own. But, that's because it's real. Since ghosts are pretend, the GHOST HUNTERS will never find any, so they are forced to fill their show with bullshit -- the only way they can get results while hunting something that doesn't exist is to overreact at every little sound. The makers of AMITYVILLE, on the other hand, settle for the same bullshit when they were only limited by their imaginations. They could have made something awesome.

Like POLTERGEIST.