Hurry up and scare me!

I suppose there are people out there who are not familiar with the De Feo murders in Amityville, New York and the strange happenings that followed and finally chased the Lutz family out the front door. Perhaps it is for them that the made-for-TV movie was remade. Then again, maybe someone in Hollywood wasn’t satisfied with James Brolin’s riveting 1979 performance opposite Margot Kidder and decided to put things right. Wrong!

Just like the events of this supposedly true story, there are no real explanations. At least there weren’t until this remake appeared. No, it’s not a sacred Indian burial ground, but it’s close. And even though it kind of makes sense, it’s completely unsatisfying.

Maybe I should have had a lobotomy before I went to the theatre. Then it would have seemed so fresh instead of stale and lifeless.

The actors do a fair job of slowly freaking out. Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George as the loving couple who lose their way and their minds really don’t have much to work with here. The story itself is on a collision course towards the finale giving no time to build characters we care about.

Quick flashes of dead people are accompanied by a jolting chord of heavy synth in case we’re not sure when to jump. Out takes from an old Nine Inch Nails video are flashed before our eyes like candy for Satan. Oooooh! I’m sooo scared! The problem here is that the terror is not generated by the people in this film. They seem to be victims of a bad director, not ghosts.

There should have been more lingering shots of the house, more menace from the walls. The original version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting” is a great example of this. Kubrick’s “The Shining” is another.

Maybe this movie is just too slick for its own good. It wants to scare the pants off of you. It does have a few minor moments of creepiness. Somehow they usually get flattened by bloody special effects or torrents of rain.

The most frightening moments are the semi-normal ones. The wood chopping scene with Reynolds playing George Lutz as a slightly disturbed daddy is effective. The babysitter’s scene is one of the best in the whole movie. Too bad it feels rushed.

The fact that the film is over in less than ninety minutes attests to the fact that there isn’t enough time to really delve into the psychological side of Amityville, something that Hitchcock would have exploited for maximum effect. I have a sneaking suspicion that there was much cut out of this movie either for being too gory or simply because the people who made it didn’t really know what they were doing. If James Brolin were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave.