The Amityville Horror
So last night I was sitting here around 10:30PM and got to thinking bout seeing a movie. I seen on the computer that Amityville was playing at 10:40. If I was gonna go see it I was going to have to move fast... like immediately. I jumped up put Roscoe in the kitchen to his dismay. (He broke out of my barricade while I was out the other day so I bought this gate for him which he doesn't like at all. No sense of adventure while I'm away I guess.) I patted his head and gave him his chewy and ran out the door.
Anyway, I run down the street and get there just in time to see a few previews. A couple of them looked kind of cool but nothing too memorable or whatever. One was some crudder movie that said 'From the director of Pearl Harbor'... like bragging about it. After wading through the previews, this flick starts up and right off the bat I start feeling like I'm in big trouble. The opening scene which is the original house murders is shot really annoyingly. All extra flashy flash super stylee and quickchoppy edits. For a scene that could carry real oomph, it was unscary totally and chicken about good gore.
After that, the thing that sort of surprised me was for the next hour I was sort of into this movie. I mean don't get me wrong, it is trash that belongs in the dumpster out back under a pile of old stinky lo mein and banana peels-- but something about the cheesy cheapness of the scares here was entertaining. I got jolted a few times. Typical crap like, quiet bathroom scene... la la la... water running... la la la....nothing going on here.. la la la then BOOM! ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE'S A HORRIBLE CREATURE MAN WITH BLOOD POURING OUT HIS MOUTH RIGHT BEHIND YOU! LOOK! LOOK! Then a two seconds later the creature man is gone. Was he there? Was he wasn't there? I gotta admit a few of those shockseconds gave me a respectable jolt.
So I sat back and ate wasabis and enjoyed the movie. For a while, I shrugged off the 'Why the don't they just get out of the house?!' factor (which is abused here big time). And dismissed the fact that besides the lead guy- all other characters are terrible. Including the house. The kids personalities are more like cameos and the house itself really isn't scary. This flick was running like a really poorman's suburban Shining and I was liking it fine. But after an hour of acceptable trash... this movie flies completely off the rails and slams into a dumbwall... hard.
The last forty minutes is a friggin disaster. The 'Just get out of the f**king house already!!! factor' is so screamingly loud that it's beyond eye rolly into brain rolly. And the desperate attempt to actually cob together a plot felt like the writer showed up way late and ran through the script with his pants around his ankles yelling out stuff like, 'Demons! Indians! Guns! Basement! Secret thing! Crazy guy! Old history! Scary scary! Redrum! Bye!'
Un-scary. Un-conceivable. Un-fun. Un-derpants.
Three Good Things About this Movie
- A few scenes actually did scare me.
- I thought the lead actor actually did a nice job.
- There was a hot babysitter girl who was fun.
Three Bad Things About this Movie
- All three children functioned as weak links.
- The house itself was no threat and not scary.
- The mom acted so staggeringly stupid she actually became a bad guy.
So that was that. I can't say if it was better than the original because I probably haven't seen that one in 20 years. And it might be 20 more years before I breakdown and select that movie off the V-Cat on my V. ('V-Cat' is what they're gonna call digital video catalogs in twenty years and TV will become just 'V'. I just made that up!) Anyway, yeah this movie is crapity crap and blah blah blah no doubt but I gotta admit-- as I walked home on the quiet empty street, I nodded my head approvingly at the fact that I nervously suspected there was a chance I was about to get hit with an axe.