CS Daily Archive > Weekend Read > 04/15/05

For God's Sake, Get Out of the Theater!

By nick randall

This remake adds little if anything new to the horror genre but surprisingly, the best part about this film is the character development. Unfortunately, the worst part about it is the cheap scares that grow old after ten minutes.

The Amityville Horror (2005)

Scott Kosar
Based on the novel by Jay Anson and the earlier screenplay by Sandor Stern

In this based-on-true-events remake of the 1979 James Brolin classic, a young man in Amityville, New York murders his family only to claim that voices from inside his house made him do it. Despite the man's testimony, the house is put on sale and just one year later, the unsuspecting Lutz family moves in. Soon thereafter, stepfather George (Ryan Reynolds) hears the same creepy voices and becomes increasingly hot-tempered with wife Kathy (Melissa George) and their three children (Jess James, Jimmy Bennett, Chloë Grace Moretz). As the family begins to unravel, Kathy realizes the house isn't so perfect after all.

Surprisingly, screenwriter Scott Kosar digs right into character development, of all things, right from the start, revealing things like that Kathy's oldest child Billy () isn't fond of George and wants his real dad back. This story thread makes us believe there's more to the film than just a few scary moments.

But while the original slowly built suspense with a disciplined dose of scares, this Horror wastes no time in tossing in ghost after ghost, in an almost desperate attempt to show that it's as cool as The Ring or The Grudge. One eerie presence is even a dead little girl -- wow, never seen that before -- who runs around with a bullet hole in her head. The first time she shows up, it's damn scary because it's unexpected. But soon she's popping up all over the place, and the trick becomes more annoying that scary.

Perhaps the most legitimate spook comes when the writer smartly shifts the point of view to the youngest son, Michael, and we follow him into the bathroom during the middle of the night for a much needed potty break. As he watches the door, scared out of his wits by the creepy house, it's so easy to feel like a six-year-old again. This works because it feeds off our fear of the unknown, not our fear of CGI.

The rest of the scares, however, don't carry the same suspense. Whereas George's personality shift in the original is never clearly explained and thus leaves more up to the audience's imagination, here the script ensures that the audience understands completely what happened and why it happened. And come on, what's so scary about that?

The happy discovery that this Horror serves up some nice character development is offset by the lack of truly scary things in this scary movie. But if you want to be frightened, either rent the original or just consider that this film is one of the last in MGM's legacy as it fades into the Sony sunset. Now that's scary.

The Amityville Horror (2005)
MGM
Rated R; 126 min.

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Nick Randall is one of the aspirants currently paying for a degree in screenwriting. He has written two features, a TV spec, and a TV pilot. After spending the first twenty-one years of his life in the Midwest, the thing he misses most in L.A. is Steak 'n Shake..
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