The Movie Room

The Amityville Horror, 2005 directed by Andrew Douglas

Rating: 2/10

When I was first getting into horror movies, this was one of the ones I watched most often so I bought it hoping that it would hold up at least a little bit. It definitely isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but a lot of it is worse than I remembered.

The original Amityville Horror movie from the 1970s is not one of the all-time greats, but it is a well-made and effective enough haunted house film based off a book that is much scarier, even though it is all admitted bullshit. There are just so many decisions here to differentiate this from the original, and all of them are bad. They make the lead shirtless more, which isn’t a bad thing as it’s peak Ryan Reynolds, and add in a sexy nanny, but somehow it is less sexy than the original—maybe because Reynolds and Melissa George have much less chemistry than James Brolin and Margot Kidder and because the sexy nanny scene is just cliché and obnoxious more than sexy. In the original, the nanny was a good girl who was being locked in a closet and justifiably freaking out; here she is coded as a stereotypical horror bad-girl who asks a young boy if he likes to French kiss, so like many non-virgins before her it is okay for her to be tortured in the closet by a ghost who makes her smush her finger around her bullet wound. The original nanny scene was so effective and chilly in its simplicity; the new one tries to sex it up and just comes off as boring and overwrought.

Beyond its paling in comparison to earlier versions of this story, this film also fails as horror more often than not because it relies on jump scares that are maybe the dumbest jump scares I’ve ever seen. I do not like when horror movies rely on jump scares, but they usually have somewhat of a narrative basis—the heroine thinks she sees the ghost but it’s really just a cat and she is relieved, or something like that. But the jump scares here rarely even affect the family; they are just for our benefit. Why are these ghosts randomly flailing around constantly when they have no effect on the family? If the movie gave some back story so it was like the ghosts were at war with each other like the first season of American Horror Story or something like the twist in The Others then the ghost behavior would make sense but as it is it just feels more comedic; it is as if this was a mockumentary and the ghosts are hamming it up for the camera a la What We Do in the Shadows.

My nostalgia tints a lot of movies that I would otherwise not love, but even those rose-colored glasses are not enough to redeem this movie with its idiotic adaptational choices and somehow more moronic than usual abundance of jump scares. No wonder the most lasting impact this movie has had on me is every time I think of chopping wood for fires (and I do love fires in winter), Ryan Reynolds angrily chopping is burned into my brain.