The Amityville Horror (1979)
Directed by: Stuart Rosenberg
Starring: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger, Don Stroud, Murray Hamilton, John Larch, Natasha Ryan, K.C. Martel, Meeno Peluce, Michael Sacks, Helen Shaver, Amy Wright, Val Avery, Irene Dailey, Marc Vahanian

(out of 4)

For God's sake - Refinance!

The countless number of films in the Amityville Horror series all started with this 1979 haunted house flick starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder (fresh off of Superman), which was supposedly based on a true story as depicted in Jay Anson’s 1977 book. In 1975, George and Kathleen Lutz and their three kids moved into the Dutch Colonial home located at 112 Ocean Ave in Amityville, Long Island. After about a month of excessive “paranormal activity” they left in a hurry, leaving all their possessions behind. There has been a lot of controversy concerning the truth of the claims of the Lutz family, although George Lutz insisted that “most” of the story was true and held that position until his death a few years ago. The dispute over the physical damage to the house due to supernatural causes and the accounts of Father Pecoraro (named Father Delaney in the film) is beyond the scope of my review, but I encourage you to Google it to your heart’s content. What is certain is that a year before the Lutzes moved into the Amityville house, previous resident Ronald (“Butch”) DeFeo, Jr brutally shot to death his parents, brothers, and sisters there.

Time to change that underwear!

The murders are depicted at the beginning of the film, happening during a terrible lightning storm, natch. (The story behind the DeFeo murders will later be explored in the prequel Amityville II: The Possession). When we meet the Lutzes – George (Brolin) and Kathy (Kidder), they are already aware of the murders but can’t pass up a chance at the good old American dream. Having just married, with Kathy bringing two boys and a girl into the family, the couple seem happy enough, even if George seems a bit stolid (could be that beard/mountain man look he wears). Not too long after they arrive, Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) shows up to bless the house, but he becomes gravely ill, attacked by flies, and told in a threatening, disembodied voice to “Get Out.” With the Lutz family playing behind the house, they don’t even see him, which is the beginning of a running joke concerning broken lines of communication (everytime Kathy tries to call him, the phone line gives static and Father Delaney suffers physical harm). The severing of the life line between Kathy and Delaney, as well as Delaney (the true believer) and the Church, is a noticeable metaphor here, and I detected some hostility towards the Catholic Church in general – on more than one occasion, Delaney’s superiors refuse to believe his story of Satanic intervention, and even after our poor Father loses his sight, his assistant Father Bolen (Don Stroud) repeatedly blocks Kathy’s attempts to contact him. Not much faith is placed in Christianity – any person of the Church is immediately sickened upon crossing the threshold and crosses, as usual, only serve to piss the house off.

Since the Superman breakup, regular dudes can't measure up.

The religious drama is probably the most interesting thing about the film, as the rest of the running time is filled with mostly minor incidents, like the babysitter being locked in the closet despite there being no locks on the doors, a window closing on a boy’s hand, nightmares, and the strange behavior of little Amy (Natasha Ryan) talking to “Jody”, her invisible friend. With black goo bubbling up from the toilet, George becoming a bit too attached to a trusty axe, the front door being ripped from the hinges by an unseen presence, and a psychic friend being temporarily possessed, we in the audience start thinking that Amy’s invisible friend might not be a figment of her imagination and that it would be prudent for everyone to just get the hell out. George and Kathy, of course, are oblivious to the idea that they might be living in a haunted house, so they are going to stick around, being one of the dumbest couples I have ever seen in these kind of movies. It takes bleeding walls to convince them to leave; Eddie Murphy said it best: “Y’all stay in the house too fuckin’ long If there’s a ghost in the house, get the fuck out !”

The blowout preventer is not working.

The performances of the leads are pretty good – Kidder does beautiful and vulnerable very well. Steiger does his best to ham it up, but still keeps things interesting. The weaknesses of The Amityville Horror manifest themselves in the laughter-inducing effects, which break the momentum because they are too goofy to be believable (a cheesy effect of a Satanic pig with red eyes is the funniest). The muddled, anticlimactic ending doesn’t help – despite our main character falling into a pit of black goo, I never really got the sense he was in too much danger. Other plot points are introduced but they go nowhere – the detective (Val Avery) who doesn’t detect anything, the beer-holding neighbor who disappears, the lack of closure to the priest storyline, the plot point of George’s strange resemblance to Butch DeFeo never being explored. If the creators of the movie intended the script to be as true to the Lutz story as possible, then kudos to them, but it doesn’t make for a particularly exciting conclusion – the material is probably best suited for a book or documentary. I must, however, give credit to The Amityville Horror for doing the possessed-father-with-an-axe bit before Kubrick adopted it for The Shining (and in a haunted house, no less!) Thinking about the similarities with that film made me wish that Amityville had used the possession angle to exploit the conflict between the children and their new stepfather, something that was hinted at slightly in the beginning. Alas, just another avenue the film chooses not to explore.

- Bill Gordon

How can Bacon be evil? It tastes so good!

It’s Labor Day, and we thought it would be a good time to let you know about upcoming horror movies for September and October.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Release Date: September 10, 2010

In the world of the undead, Alice (Milla Jovovich) continues her fight against the creators of the T-virus – the Umbrella Corporation. Tagging along is Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory). In 3D.

Devil

Release Date: September 17, 2010

Bojana Novakovic in Devil

Written by M. Night Shyamalan, the synopsis as given by the official site is amusingly simple: a group of people are trapped in an elevator, and one of them is the devil!

Monsters

Release Date: September 24, 2010 (Video On Demand)
Release Date: October 29, 2010 (theaters)

Monster pic: NASA launches to probe to collect samples of alien life. The probe crashes in Central America and soon after, new life forms appear in Mexico. These new life forms are not friendly.

Buried

Release Date: September 24, 2010

Creepy-looking LionsGate release about a guy (Ryan Reynolds) who wakes up in a coffin with nothing but a lighter and a cell phone.

Let Me In

Release Date: October 1, 2010

A young boy who is frequently bullied befriends a young girl that moves in next door. She’s not all she appears to be. This is a remake of Let the Right One In.

Case 39

Release Date: October 1, 2010

A social worker (Renee Zellweger) fights to save a girl from her abusive parents – she intervenes just in time before the parents succeed in killing her. After taking the girl in, she discovers that the girl harbors a horrifying secret.

Chain Letter

Release Date: October 1, 2010

Six friends receive a chain letter on their cell phones. They fail to continue the chain. They die. With a message for you to text “chain” to 74700 to get “chained”, the target audience for this flick is obvious.

Paranormal Activity (2007)
Directed by: Oren Peli
Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Amber Armstrong

1/2 (out of 4)

This is very disappointing amateur porn.

Micah, a day trader, and Katie, an English major, live together in a nice San Diego town home. Micah just got himself a brand new camera, the purpose of which is to document the eerie, paranormal goings on that seem to be related to Katie’s history of being followed around by an unseen presence since she was about 8 years old. At the beginning of Paranormal Activity, we get no credits, no opening Paramount logo, no title card – we are simply guests to the viewing of Micah and Katie’s home movie. The film is shot in camcorder-style (using a Sony Handycam HDR-FX1) – sometimes hand-held by our main characters, sometimes stationary, when Micah places it on a table overlooking the bed. You guessed it – Paranormal Activity is The Blair Witch Project of the 00s.

Written and directed by Oren Peli, the film is bare-bones, with a touch of special effects that are well integrated into the environment. Like Blair Witch, there are no musical themes, makeup, tracking shots, “cinematic” styles. The idea is that you are watching footage that has been discovered by police after the events – on this level, I was very surprised to find that Paranormal Activity works pretty well. Peli likes the slow-burn, so he starts off with small events – a loud noise, keys falling off the kitchen counter, the bedroom door moving a few inches. Micah, being amused, taunts the ghost, or demon, as a local psychic (Mark Fredrichs) believes it is, which is probably not a good idea. Then Katie starts acting strangely – having nightmares, standing at the side of the bed in the same position for hours, sleepwalking outside. Micah gets the dumb idea of using a Ouija board to try to contact the entity – something everybody tells him is a horrible idea but he goes through with anyway. Then the demon really gets pissed off. It leaves a burned photo from a house fire from Katie’s past in the attic, it drags her out of bed… and naturally the demonologist is out of town. (There’s never a good demonologist when you need one).

2 Girls, 1 Cup Reaction Shot

I liked the film. Normally, I’m not a big fan of the hand-held-camera/POV/gonzo-style of film-making – especially with horror flicks, because in real life you reach a point where you toss the camera when monsters are chasing you, posterity be damned. To the movie’s credit, it sets up situations where it’s more plausible that the characters would continue filming, given that most of the time, their circumstances aren’t immediately life-threatening, and Peli manages to keep “shaky-cam” to a minimum. I think where he succeeds is in the mixing of the supernatural with the mundane of everyday life, in a way that has a proper balance. The movie never veers so far out of the “suburban living” experience that I was pulled out of it. There also might be something to the idea that things seem more real when viewed through the personal handycam, as opposed to watching it in stylish 35mm. There could be, also, my increasing familiarity with this style of filmmaking – I am more comfortable with it, and perhaps we all are, in the age of YouTube where Ludditism has completely disappeared and we have all given in to technology; part of this involves our embrace of voyeurism, something that the movie’s many bedroom scenes will appeal to.

Looks like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie have been here...

Not to say Paranormal Activity doesn’t have flaws. It’s fairly predictable (Katie’s fate is telegraphed early on); the ending is slightly anticlimactic. Micah never thinks to take his footage to the media, or at least to some more experts in the paranormal (he seems really adamant that collecting all data will help him fix the “problem” but he never really does anything useful with it). Finally, the film uses shock tactics like loud sudden noises, or closing doors to frighten – personally I didn’t find the flick very frightening, merely intriguing. If you gave in to the Paramount spin machine, you’ll probably be disappointed – this movie has been hailed and hyped as some kind of masterpiece, and it’s certainly not that. Most positive reactions, I feel, could be due to the idea that Paranormal Activity is the antithesis of the modern shock-horror/torture-porn movies that have invaded the mainstream. This flick is a plausible alternative to that tired genre, which could explain why it creamed Saw VI at the box office in October of 2009. (it took in $22 million opening weekend; Saw VI took $14 million). The movie is not wholly original (it owes debt to The Exorcist as well as Blair Witch, Cannibal Holocaust, [Rec], etc), but there is a simplicity in its premise that appealed to me. I think it manages to add a little more realism to the ghost story by bringing it inside the suburban home – I am not surprised that Spielberg took a liking to it, given his involvement with another suburban spook story – as well as his own low-budget debut Duel. While the movie probably works best as a shared experience (midnight screenings and all that), it’s still not bad for a lazy afternoon in your living room, as long as you temper your expectations.

- Bill Gordon

If you guys don't shape up, I can not be of any use to you somewhere else.

Good movie poster art sticks with you. And nobody can deny the importance of a good poster from a marketing standpoint – the point of posters (and trailers) is to get your butt in the seat. When I was a kid, I was drawn to certain cover art in the video stores – usually to movies my parents wouldn’t let me see, like Evil Dead or I Spit On Your Grave. Posters can be clever, or deliberately provocative, and they can even stand alone as pieces of art. Here are 20 horror posters that I think possess at least one of these qualities.

Click the thumbnails for a larger version

20. Shock Waves (1977)

I remember Shock Waves being deadly dull. Maybe I was just disappointed, because the poster was so damn cool. Who doesn’t like underwater zombies? Of course, I haven’t seen it in years; perhaps I should give it another go.

19. Phase IV (1974)

As a kid I found this poster rather unsettling. The image of a lone ant emerging from the palm of your hand… that’s just wince inducing to me. Imagine my surprise years later when I actually watched the film and found it to be an intelligent piece of science fiction.

18. Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

I have yet to see this pic from the late 70s starring Brooke Shields (also known as Communion). But the image of a kitchen knife in the back of a baby doll is just – messed up. Somebody had a screwed up childhood, methinks.

17. Creepshow (1982)

The cover art for this homage to E.C. horror comics is well done and also has an old-school quality to it. It’s a simple idea – but also effective.

16. Blood Beach (1980)

The poster for Blood Beach is brilliant, as is the tagline which spoofs Jaws 2: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water – you can’t get to it.” Folks, the people who came up with this marketing gimmick deserve medals. I heard the movie sucks hard, but still want to see it. Probably because of the poster.

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