It's always been difficult for me to tell where "The Amityville Horror" ends and "The Shining" begins. Aside from the fact that the latter book-turned-Stanley-Kubrick-classic by Stephen King deals with a snowed-in hotel rather than a family home, aren't they both just haunted house stories? The original film version of "Horror" (released a year before 1980's Kubrick film) was an unpretentious b-level horror flick low on budget and high on goosebumps. While I can't claim to be an authority on the facts of the real life events that inspired the book, or the previous three films to bear its title, it seems that the "Amityville Horror" remake is less about generating any real thrills and more about scaring up a quick buck.
As with the original film, the remake follows the ill-fated Lutz family, George (Ryan Reynolds), Kathy (Melissa George) and their three kids. George is new to the family after the death of the kids' father, so there's some built in tension already. But that's nothing in comparison to what they find when they move into their steal-of-the-century Long Island mansion, former home to the even more ill-fated DeFeo family.
It becomes pretty clear early on that this ain't your grandfather's "Horror". The immense would-be Dutch Colonial of the remake is, what I can only call, severely haunted. While it's no Overlook Hotel, Casa de Lutz is by no means timid either. Its air vents all but scream "you're living in a haunted house" and there's one of those spooky, pale little girls that keeps popping up and pointing out that director Andrew Douglas has been watching his fair share of Japanese horror.
Mr. Reynolds, anachronistically movie-star buff for an early 70s contractor, fared better as a vampire hunter in "Blade: Trinity". Here he does very little to modulate his transformation from loving step-dad, to axe-wielding demon-host. Ms. George is more effective as the mother trying to hold together her new family. With her elongated face and toothy smile, Ms. George channels shades of more than just Shelley Duvall's "Shining" performance. But the actors can do very little to make the film anything more than a standard haunted house walk-through.
The screenplay by Scott Kosar, who also penned the remake of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", seems content to just throw the family into one randomly horrific situation after another. And a tacked-on Indian burial ground explanation only serves to invite unwanted comparisons another far superior fright-fest, "Poltergeist". Unlike that early 80s Tobe Hooper gem and Mr. Kubrick's "Shining", this new "Horror" does nothing to build character, tension or suspense. What's left is a unique fixer-upper, haunted by ghosts of better films past.
