Spoilers Ahoy.

It's far too obvious and too easy to claim that all of the problems with Andrew Douglas' The Amityville Horror stem from the fact that it's a remake. While there's certainly cause for concern in the fact that mainstream Hollywood has so overtly run out of novel ideas, there's something to be said for the prospect of remaking 1979's The Amityville Horror. Both Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate and Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were, as remakes of classic, essential American films, far better than they had any real right to be, if still not on par with their original counterparts. By approaching a film that wasn't the least bit good to begin with, The Amityville Horror presents a far different proposition: could a remake possibly find something interesting or, at the very least, entertaining in a deadly dull, horribly produced film based on events that have been revealed to be a terribly executed hoax?

Andrew Douglas' The Amityville Horror provides a definitive answer to that question. No. No, it can't.

At least not if the new version of the film is arguably worse than its source. The Amityville Horror's tagline, rather than, "For God's sake... Get out!," should have been, "The law of diminishing returns." From hoax to book to film to remake, there's nothing to be mined from the soil in Amityville.

Stuart Rosenberg's 1979 film was little more than two and a half hours of doors slamming shut, Margot Kidder's stretching her eyes to borderline inhuman extremes, and lingering questions of how a haunted house could also manage to influence elevators and cars from a distance of several miles. Its only horror is the seemingly real chance that it could bore someone to death. That it spawned six sequels-- only two of which were released theatrically-- doesn't suggest that the film actually has a fanbase so much as it speaks to shrill corporate greed. Like Children of the Corn and its spawn, Amityville has a franchise not because the original film merits one but because an endless series of sequels was just what one did with a horror film in the 80s. If not for "real life" George Lutz's habit of making media rounds every few years to insist that he didn't, in fact, fabricate the entirety of his family's twenty-eight day experience in the ominous-looking house on Ocean Avenue, both Amityville and Amityville would likely have been forgotten by now.

But, in light of the success of Nispel's relentlessly grim take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, along comes Douglas' remake of The Amityville Horror. And it may not be boring, but, oh, is it ever a mess.

Briefly, the based-on-a-true-story-except-not-at-all plot: newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz and Kathy's three children from a previous marriage move into a "too good to be true" house that they shouldn't be able to afford. The catch, at least as it's explained to the Lutzes by their realtor, is that a young man named Ronnie DeFeo took a shotgun to his parents and four siblings in the house just a year prior to the Lutzes' signing the mortgage papers. Over the course of twenty-eight days, George becomes increasingly affected by the "evil" that failed to read its eviction notice. After George attempts to murder Kathy and her children, the Lutzes finally recognize that they should maybe consider leaving the house.

"Haunted House" films are a pretty difficult sell regardless-- in recent memory, only The Others and Session 9 have managed any lasting impression at all, and both of those films rely more heavily on a palpable sense of menace than on traditional scare tactics. Douglas, on the other hand, relies exclusively on jump scares-- throwing a cat through a window, accompanied by a loud "sting" from the score. The house itself doesn't convey any sense of dread. Since the original film, the set design for the house appears to have been taking diet tips from Renee Zellweger, which places it somewhere on the "not altogether healthy" side of "scary." It's all eyes and jagged, and nothing that a nice coat of paint or maybe a sandwich wouldn't fix. But, in the sense that the house itself needs to be developed as a "character" in order for the haunted house conceit to work, Douglas sure spends a whole lot of his film's running time down at the boathouse. It's indicative of his overall lack of vision and skill that one of his few attempts to elicit scares from the house proper involves refrigerator magnets.

Instead, the duty of conveying menace falls largely to George (Ryan Reynolds, now and forever "Billy" from Fifteen, "Nickelodeon's continuing high school drama"), who responds to his family's insistence that something is amiss in their home as any father would, by taking off his shirt whenever possible, attempting both to bait and to combat the supernatural with his rock-hard abs. Seriously, boy's ripped. During one of the Lutzes' first nights in the house-- and Douglas begins the film using title cards to keep pace with the story's timeline, but abandons those title cards less than one-third of the way through the film because he's a complete and utter hack-- George ventures down to the boathouse and dives into the water while wearing only a pair of paper-thin pajama pants that are so low-slung that, for the twenty subsequent minutes in which George drips around the house, The Amityville Horror looks like it's about to turn into something on late-night Cinemax. And, charismatic though his torso might be, Reynolds is a gapingly untalented actor. So his "conveying menace" basically amounts to "growing an unkempt beard" and "wearing bloodshot contact lenses that you can actually see the edges of because, again, Douglas is a hack." George also makes crazy-eyes while threatening a child with an axe because the original film doesn't have enough material of its own, so Douglas needs to rip off The Shining, as well.

Kathy (Mulholland Dr's Melissa George and her ginormous Heather Graham eyes, continuing her career's downward spiral) is such a thin character that she may as well have been renamed "Reaction Shot." Like Drew Barrymore's "Lindsey" in Fever Pitch, Kathy exists in the film almost exclusively to react to what her betrothed does. Were the entirety of the film not so start-to-finish stupid, it might qualify as casually misogynist.

Of course, it is Kathy who makes the late-film discovery as to the origins of the evil that lives in her house, and is it ever fantastic stuff. Spending what the film says is at least eight hours playing with microfilm at the Amityville Public Library, Kathy learns that the original foundation of her new home included an underground chamber where the landowner tortured twenty-odd Native Americans. The man who did this then dressed up like the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers and slashed his own throat with a scythe so that his malicious spirit would then inhabit the house forever. So it's really just incidental that the "ghosts" of the tortured Native Americans attack George after he discovers their tomb. Were the entirety of the film not so start-to-finish stupid, it might qualify as casually racist. And, for all of the "dead Indian" hokum, it turns out that Douglas is openly ripping off Poltergeist-- which, at this rate, should be set for a remake around 2008-- as much as remaking The Amityville Horror.

So the house is possessed by the spirit of some whack-job who decided to torture some Native Americans. Which then begs the question of why it's actually the ghost of the youngest DeFeo child, Jodie (Isabel Conner, awful beneath fright make-up that's halfway between The Ring's "Samara" and Penelope Cruz) who appears as a vision to the realtor, George, the babysitter, and Chelsea, the youngest member of the Lutz brood (Chloe Grace Moretz, channeling Dakota Fanning). Or why, in one of those visions, Jodie appears to have been hanged, when it has already been established that Jodie was shot. Or why Jodie convinces Chelsea to climb onto the roof of the house. Or why the arms of the tortured Native Americans pull Jodie down into the floor during the Carrie-inspired, stupid epilogue. Or why none of the other DeFeos haunt the house. Or how or why Jodie managed to give the one-eyed teddy bear with which she was buried to Chelsea.

And so on and so forth indefinitely. Nothing in The Amityville Horror makes the tiniest shred of sense, since Douglas and screenwriter Scott Kosar can't even establish the most rudimentary of an internal logic.

Oh, and about that rooftop escapade: Douglas spends fully fifteen minutes trying to get Chelsea down, with Kathy managing to scuttle up a drainpipe onto the balance-beam at the perch of the roof and with George saving the day, using his American Gladiator biceps to hold onto an awning and to catch Chelsea as she plummets from the roof. During George's final "Here's Johnny" chase sequence, then, it's worth noting that Kathy directs her three children to climb down from the same portion of the roof by way of a fire-escape ladder that spans the full three stories of the house. The Amityville Horror is a special kind of awful.

And it would surely rate as among the worst films of this or any recent year if not for an extended, if isolated sequence involving an anachronistically skanked-out babysitter, Lisa (Dumb and Dumberer's Rachel Nichols), in which the film turns into precisely the exercise in high camp that the entire affair should have been. Though the remainder of the screenplay, sadly, means that it can't be taken seriously as post-modern, Lisa comments on the film's greater illogic as she tells the two Lutz boys, adolescent Billy (The Butterfly Effect's Jesse James, already making a career of being the best part of whatever he's in by a wide margin) and funny-looking Michael (Jimmy Bennett, sure to emerge as D.J. Qualls' heir apparent), about the fate of the DeFeo family. That doing so upsets not-Samara isn't the least bit surprising, but there's something hysterical in the fact that Lisa ends up locked inside a closet that doesn't have a lock on the door, trapped with Jodie, who, in a they-have-to-be-kidding moment, makes Lisa finger her gunshot wound. It's gleefully over-the-top and absurd, and it's perfectly performed by Nichols, James, and Moretz. This sequence isn't enough to redeem the film as a whole, but it's ridiculous enough to elevate The Amityville Horror just ever-so-slightly over the too-stupid-to-be-campy Sahara and Elektra. And, well, if that isn't a backhanded compliment...

But, as is always the case in Hollywood, the abs emerge victorious over the evil forces of the creepy ghost girl, the Native Americans' misdirected hostility, and the suicidal sociopath with the scythe. That the horror is a hoax should be what robs the film of any legitimate dramatic tension. That it's actually Douglas' profound incompetence also robs the film of any value as escapist entertainment. The only lasting scare from The Amityville Horror is that, given its opening box office haul, there's a good chance that someone will pay Douglas to remake The Amityville Dollhouse... and that people might see it.

Recommended:
No