Amityville Horror -- 2005 -- R

All right, I've seen all available Amityville films to date. This is actually a remake of the original Amityville film, but I would wager it was based on the original book, as opposed to a rewrite of the screenplay based on the elements in the flick. How'd it go? Well...

The Amityville story is pretty basic and almost legendary. A family buys a house where grisly murders happened about a year earlier; more specifically, a guy kills his entire family and claims demonic possession as the reason (the voices told him to do it). Stuff starts happening as they're there, and the father starts to follow the path of the son from the previous year, threatening to kill his entire as well. After 28 days, they leave the house and never return.

This incarnation focuses more on the supernatural element of the story and minimizes the prevalent religious aspect of the first version. This makes sense given the individual climates the films were made in. The original was made in the era following the Exorcist where the priest and religion was an important part of the story. Now, we're in the world of J-horror with freaky ghost children, so the supernatural element is brought out in our current version...complete with freaky ghost children.

How does this affect the story? Well, the original ran like a low budget horror flick focusing on the characters and their interactions with the house. This scond one had a considerably higher budget, apparently, as character development was minimized and we learned more about the history of the house, and got some nice outside chase scenes all over the steeply pitched roof. This, of course, means that we only marginally had any concern for the characters and their troubles beyond a story we might see on the evening news. Backstory would have been nice.

I will say bringing out the supernatural element did help the plot considerably. It really did help us to understand what kind of effect the possession was having on the father, and why he felt the need to kill his family. That was actually the highest point of this verson, and where the original didn't do as well. It's one thing to "get" the possession on a fundamental level, but it's something else to see the world through his eyes.

The final scene, though, we could have done without. It was kinda dumb, and took us down from decent to silly.

So the revision leaves me with a mixed review. On the one hand, we never get a sense of who these people are beyond the cliche, so it's hard to relate to them on much of any level. On the other, it works in the supernatural element like the Amityville series never had allowing a better understanding of the psychological element.