The Amityville Horror
Whisper after me. The horror, the horroorr. The Amityville Horror ..
It must be worth a PhD – a survey and comparison of all the useless re-makes with their often useless originals, and the reason useless film makers embark on them. Okay, okay, hard to get more than a line or two out of the reason … it always comes back to a failure of imagination, whether by the studio or by the producers or anyone else who can be blamed …
The most obvious useless re-makes are the cannibalisation of European films as they’re re-imagined into Americana so gormless and cretinous as to remove any reason to watch them, except if you have troubling reading subtitles over the super sized popcorn you have sitting in your mid Western lap (maw, why’s they speaking funny, hush yo mouth Cletiss got to move my head up and down to read the subtitles). If you think I’m joking watch The Vanishing, or any of a dozen other recent examples.
But Hollywood’s nothing if not equal opportunity. They love to rip off their own as much as the Europeans or the Asian cinema, and a fine festering mess of grits we’ve had as a result in the last few years
Let’s not count rips like Bewitched or Lost in Space – on a technical level, they should be called spin offs, even where they might have made an original feature film rip at the time the shows were first popular. So we don’t have to worry about all the half baked rips of US series and sitcom television that’s poured onto the screens – that’s a separate thesis.
No, you should be able to churn out a hundred thousand words on the likes of Stepford Wives and yes The Amityville Horror (let’s wipe from the mind the color version of Psycho, for fear all critical faculties will be erased thinking about it for longer than a minute, or the recent go at Ned Kelly, or The War of the Worlds, or anything else the tireless dung beetles have failed to break down).
Let’s stick instead with The Amityville Horror, since long after The Simpsons did the definitive remake, we’re suddenly lumbered with this useless piece of junk, now infesting video rental stores like a plague of dead ones and zeroes.
The makers recognised the problem – in the best traditions of the drive in double bill, they’ve kept the running time to just over 85 minutes (so you get five minutes of left overs in the DVD extras). And the sound track works over time to generate a few cheap thrills, and cut through the sound of munched popcorn.
But that’s where it comes unstuck. Poor sweet Aussie princess with the swollen lips, Melissa George, works hard for the money, but shows she’s got all the depth of a mop bucket, while the pretty boy opposite her has all the character of a piece of 2 x 4.
The story of course is as old as the hills, but fortunately – gasp – is based on a true story. Psycho takes out a whole family, and when later innocent family move in, they discover the place is haunted.
Natch things get a little fraught, as it’s a fine old house, and greed and status and lifestyle are preferable to relationships and to any understanding of haunted houses (participants either having watched too much or too little television to understand what’s going down).
The kids start seeing ghosties, and a pot smoking babysitter gets a decent battering (heck, she’s a pot smoker, she deserves to get taken all the way down). Still the family bounce back from the BS being carted off in an ambulance by having pretty boy become fixated on wood chopping with his sharp ax (thank the Lord, at least he’s seen The Shining).
By half time, it’s clear all the plays and riffs in the staging are going to be resolutely unoriginal – with the resemblances to the first show just the beginning of the banality.
Of course nobody thinks of moving out of the house – the countdown pretends it all happens in a month – and this fatal act of stupidity means it’s impossible to care about them. It would have been good to have a more reflexive kind of Scream version, with one character listing off the characteristic rules of haunted house shows, but clearly there was a fear that any sign of intelligence or humor would startle the punters. When you reach the point of having to kill off the heroine, then keeping her alive by courtesy of a dream, you know you’ve reached the bottom of cheatsville.
A pity, because a little more understanding of the genre and its history, and the audience would have saved everybody a lot of trouble. Instead it seems a long time since Kubrick did The Shining with wit and flair.
In fact, The Amitvyille Horror re-make is the perfect example of why Hollywood is losing its audience, as it earns the title of year’s most redundant and irrelevant re-make, beating off some pretty stiff competition in the process.
Still as a wretched meddlesome priest is despatched in fear for a bad performance, and poor ol’ Melissa stumbles in the library into a discovery that it’s all the fault of the Indians, while pretty boy stumbles through a dungeon of torture and depravity, you’re just a short step away from the end titles. Michael Bay presents. Say no more, an ax in the guts is as good as a nudge, nudge, wink wink.
If you get scared by this show, it should be at the waste of your life. If you truly get scared, climb into a boat and go for a harbour cruise, because you’ve been taken in by patriarchal craziness and feminist triumphalism when all that’s on view is undiluted silliness.
Now let’s all sign a pledge never to watch another re-make of any kind …
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