The Amityville Horror (2005)
“For God’s sake, get out!”
That was the tag line for the original Amityville Horror. You would do well to heed this advice should you find yourself trapped in a theatre showing this laughably bad remake, which strays so far afield from the original story, it makes the book (which pretty much everybody except the real George Lutz agrees was a hoax) seem… well, good.
Late one night in 1974, Ronald DeFeo (Brendan Donaldson) hears voices telling him to “catch ‘em and kill ‘em,” so he does — kill his entire family as they sleep in their beds, with a shotgun. (The only one he has to “catch” is little sister Jodie [Isabel Conner], who hides in a closet, to no avail.) Ronnie goes to prison.
A year later, George and Kathy Lutz (Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George) buy the murder house for a song and move in with Kathy’s three kids — despite the facts that 1) ghosts are already running around during their initial tour of the place, and 2) the real estate agent (Annabel Armour) comes clean about the DeFeo slayings.
A whole lot of really boring stuff happens (for instance, a bunch of talk about George and the kids adjusting to living together and stuff, as if you care). Talk, talk, talk, blah blah, blah… Finally, Kathy takes a phone call (these people do love to talk), while George goes to the basement to crank up the furnace. Now George is the one hearing voices. Then the Lutzes (uh, just the parents) have sex, while the ghost of Jodie DeFeo watches.
The next day, Chelsea (Chloe Grace Moretz), who has Jodie’s old room, starts yapping about this ghost kid (Jodie) who talks to her. Then the dog barks, and suddenly Chelsea’s outside, on a boat (they have a boathouse). Then Michael (Jimmy Bennett) is afraid to go to the bathroom by himself because he hears noises. Then, at 3:15 a.m. (the time Ronnie Boy slaughtered his kinfolk), the light switches start to bleed. Then an apparition of Killer Ronnie appears in the boys’ bedroom (which doesn’t make sense, since Ronnie is still very much alive — in real life, anyway). Then… Are you bored yet? No? Well, the rest of the audience is.
Weeks pass (although to the viewer, it seems like years), and the refrigerator magnets spell out KETCH EM & KILL EM, and then they don’t anymore. More boring stuff happens… like a scene involving a hot-looking babysitter (Rachel Nichols) that’s probably there for comic relief. (Too bad there hasn’t been any horror yet to relieve you from.) George and Kathy go out to dinner, and it’s more yakkety-yakkety-yak until you’re ready to do your best Tom Cruise impression and scream, “Show me the horror!”
Lisa the babysitter gets stoned, comes on to Billy (Jesse James), and, for a bedtime story, relates the whole story of the DeFeo murders. Then she gets locked in the closet where Jodie was killed, and sees Jodie in there with her. Jodie forces Lisa’s finger into the bullet hole in her head. (Uh… bullet hole? from a shotgun? Uh-huh.) Lisa exits the house on a stretcher. (Bye bye, Lisa!) There’s more talk-talk-talk as George and Kathy try to figure out what the bejeebers is going on with these darned kids of theirs.
The next day, Chelsea passes a few messages on to Kathy from Dead Jodie, who says there’s a bad man in the house. We think by now she must mean George, who’s being a total jerk to Billy, and hearing more voices in the basement. Georgie Boy finds some caskets down there, and… Wake up, kids, ’cause it’s finally Night of the Living Dead Time (sort of). George takes a powder, convinces himself he’s just imagining things, and goes upstairs to take a bath (yeah, like, “I’ll just go back to normal and forget all about the possibility I’m out of my freaking gourd!”) — no doubt to wash off all those nasty zombie cooties. In a scene reminiscent of (which is a nice way of saying “ripped off from”) Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, arms reach out of the bathroom walls and try to drown him in the tub. Unfortunately for us, George gets away.
George’s doctor sends him to a shrink. When the Lutzes get back from the doc’s, they find Chelsea on the roof. After they get her down (in a scene that’s supposed to be tense, but isn’t), Chelsea explains that Jodie led her up there. George decides that the family is totally f—-d up, and moves into the basement, where we hope he’ll finally get killed by zombies. Sadly, he doesn’t. But he does watch demons on his home videos. Meanwhile, Kathy talks to a priest (Philip Baker Hall), and figures out that there’s a connection between all this weird stuff and the DeFeo murders. (Gee! No dummy, this one!)
Back in the basement, George hears voices at 3:15 again; when he grabs an axe, the audience experiences a momentary glimmer of hope that he’s been inspired to pull a Shining on his family and end this flick — but no. (Sorry!) He goes out to the boathouse, looks in the water, and sees Jodie’s face under the surface. Something comes at him, and he axes it to death — and then realizes he’s just done a hatchet job on the family dog. Dumbass.
Kathy begs George to move the family out of the house… More talk… Yada yada yada… George lies to the kids and tells them the dog’s run away… The priest comes to bless the house, gets creeped out by a teddy bear (which, it turns out, was Jodie’s, as if you couldn’t guess that; it was buried with her), and pisses off the house itself when he starts tossing around holy water (which sizzles like acid). Then he gets swarmed by houseflies. Then the house yells at him to get out. So he does. By now, half the audience (the half who’s already seen The Ring, Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and about 90 other movies ripped off by TV-commercial director Andrew Douglas) has done the same.
Kathy starts researching the DeFeo murders, and finds a reference to a man called Ketcham (”Catch ‘em,” get it? Ooo-eee-ooo!) who owned the property and did gross things to Native Americans in a misguided effort to exorcise them. She goes back to see the priest, who offers this: “Your house frightens me, Mrs. Lutz.” (Now, isn’t that a priest you’d turn to in a crisis?)
Meanwhile, the chorus of voices in George’s head continues. George starts tearing apart the brickwork in the basement, and finds a secret passage, where he meets up with Ketcham, who cuts his own throat. George wakes up on the couch. Then he goes out to the boathouse, and sees lots of ghosts under the water. Kathy finds him out there, and he tries to kill her. One stupid thing leads to another, and George chases the family around with a shotgun. Kathy fights him off, and he axes her to death. But guess what? He doesn’t really kill her! It was all just another stupid hallucination!
The Lutzes leave and never come back, not even to get their stuff.
The very end shows Jodie back in the house, and, when all the clocks strike 3:15, the kid gets sucked into the floor.
The End. Thank God.
(And you thought the original sucked!)
— Thanks to Enrique, David, Flyman,
Paul the Ghost, Cruz B, Josh, and Ilya K for all the input!
Remake of:
The Amityville Horror (1979)
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