After Amityville Dollhouse fizzled out in 1996, the Amityville series went quiet for several years. But then, in the early years of the 21st century, came Michael Bay, destroyer of childhood memories and nostalgia, who has been spending the last fifteen or so years apparently trying to kickstart the apocalypse via the medium of remakes. And so here we are now with a remake of the original Amityville Horror... although at least this version could benefit from the improved levels of special effects available in 2005 instead of 1979.
November 13, 1974. Ronald DeFeo Jr kills his entire family with a shotgun in their Amityville home, claiming later that 'voices' inside the house told him to do it. One year later, the Lutz family buy and move into the same house. Unfortunately for them, the house is still occupied - by both some of the spirits of the DeFeo family and also by the evil spirits who have been in the house for considerably longer, and they all waste no time in making their presences felt. Daughter Chelsea makes friends with Jodie, the dead girl who lives in her closet, but it's George who quickly becomes the most affected by the house, becoming a bad-tempered, wood-chopping and dog-killing maniac. The house wants to make George Lutz to repeat the DeFeo murders on his own family, but will he give in to it?
So, remake. Since comparisons between this movie and the original are inevitable, let's get them out of the way first. One thing that this remake does is get rid of the whole priest subplot, and believe me - nothing of value was lost. The two scenes involving a priest are still just as effective without us having to follow a completely unrelated plot with them that never connects to the rest of the film. We also see a lot more of the spirits inside the home, rather than just a pair of glowing red eyes outside of a window. Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is the greater focus on George Lutz' psychological breakdown and descent into madness due to the house's machinations. Oh, and he kills the family dog. The real George Lutz was actually in the process of suing the film over details like that when he died in 2006 - but since it is a gratuitous animal death included solely to upset the audience, I agree with his decision to sue.
Dog murder aside, I will say that the focus on George Lutz in this version is a good one, as watching him slowly becoming an abusive madman is genuinely unsettling. I think at least part of its effectiveness is due to Ryan Reynolds' performance as George Lutz. While he's known primarily for his comedy timing and for playing Deadpool now, The Amityville Horror shows that he can play more serious roles as well. Although I suspect that the real George Lutz didn't have quite so well-defined abs...
But... while the original Amityville Horror fell down in many areas, including the area of special effects, what it did do well was portray an oppressive atmosphere in the house. This version might have better effects, but that oppression has been replaced with jump scares and, once again, the feeling that somewhere out there an orchestra was being terribly abused during the making of this movie. A key example of this is Jodie the ghost child. While we never saw her in the original, here she's visible all the time, with her white skin and black thread-like veins and shotgun hole in her forehead, and nearly every time she appears there's a musical sting like everyone dropped their instruments at the same time. She's surprisingly malevolent as well - making the babysitter go crazy and trying to make Chloe Grace Moretz walk off the roof so they can play together "forever and ever". And then there's the evil spirit at the heart of the house, renamed Jeremiah Ketchum, a preacher who tortured Native Americans in the original basement of the house in 1692. The film tries to make a creepy play on his name - "Katch 'em and Kill 'em" - but to me at least it just felt like a rejected catchphrase for a Pokemon Nuzlocke run.
In the end, this Amityville Horror remake might have had better effects and a somewhat tighter plot, but instead of using these advantages it instead fell back on the same old jump scares and cheap plot twists to try to scare its audience. It strips out most of the atmosphere of the original and leaves the film feeling like all the other horror remakes that Michael Bay has been involved in, right down to the sepia tones in the flashbacks, the quick cuts so fast that they could trigger an epileptic fit and even the same fecking fonts in the credits.
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