By Geno McGahee
I am not a fan of remakes, for the most part. They usually are just made to capitalize on the name recognition and don’t present anything new or interesting. There are few exceptions. In 2005, AMITYVILLE HORROR was released, a remake of the movie with the same name from 1979, and it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.
George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) and his wife Kathy (Melissa George) buy this huge house with a dark history. There were multiple murders by a man that insisted voices told him to do it. He had to listen to these voices because they were persistent. They kept bugging him and now that he’s rotting in prison, George is getting them.
The Lutz family finds trouble moving into the house. The biggest problem is with the young daughter, Chelsea (Chloe Grace Moretz). She is communicating with the ghost of a young child that was murdered in the house named “Jodie.” Jodie is causing all sorts of trouble. At one point she traumatizes a babysitter that is barely dressed…they threw her in for eye candy, obviously. Her boobies were showing for the world to see and then Jodie confronted her in a closet, forced her to finger her head and then made her go mad. It was absurd.
This movie has no idea how to create atmosphere. In the original, there wasn’t a lot that happened…it was a slow burn and it was affective. In this flick, they are relying on terrible CGI to scare the audience. Every ten minutes, there’s something going on. There is some ghostly figure making scary faces, scary ghost arms grabbing people, and scary ghost children hanging from the ceiling. OK, they are not that scary. They are laughable.
This movie is focusing mostly on the visuals. Ryan Reynolds had to do 1000 squat thrusts a night and 1000 sit ups an hour to get into that shape and they took advantage of it. He never wears a shirt in this movie. He worked hard to get into that shape and wants to flaunt it, but come on! The wife is smoking hot. The babysitter is smoking hot. The priest is hot…OK, not so much. The point is that there is not a normal looking person here. They are all model-like. Here’s an experiment: Go to your neighbor’s house. Knock on the door. When he answers, ask him to take off his shirt. I guarantee you that he is not in the shape that Reynolds is in. They need to cast something in between a real-looking normal person and a model/actor/actress person.
This movie is just silly and I should have known it was going to be terrible. Michael Bay was involved and he has no idea what atmosphere is. Everything is CGI and that is all this movie is relying on to scare the audience. Cheap CGI scare…George Lutz gets mad…cheap CGI scare…George Lutz gets mad…
AMITYVILLE HORROR is a silly mess with terrible CGI that wouldn’t scare a five year old. The acting is pretty good, some of the visuals (not CGI) are pretty good, like when the young girl is standing on top of the house, but the film was just terrible. I did like when the priest got attacked by thousands of CGI flies and hauled ass out of there. He was either afraid of the house or he had a date with an altar boy that he couldn’t miss.
I can’t recommend this flick, unless you want to watch something laughingly bad.
Rating: 3/10
for the record – I disagree. This movie is awesome. It isn’t as good as the original….and fine, it’s not scary. It’s silly. But it’s so much fun.
Watching Ryan Reynolds watch another Ryan Reynolds pull up the bloody head of yet another Ryan Reynolds was amazing.