BEFORE: Chloe Grace Moretz carries over one more time from "The Addams Family 2". Anybody who can cross genres, and appear in different genres can do well in my end-of-year list. She's been in 2 animated (or half-animated) films this year and now two horror films. And I'm back on Ryan Reynolds, who's having an even better year, with four action movies, one animated film, and appearances in two documentaries - so I'm not surprised that now he's showing up again in the horror chain. He can't beat out Nic Cage this year, but maybe he can tie Bruce Willis.
The horror linking is a tricky thing sometimes - I've been second-guessing myself all month by passing up on links to "Freaky" and "Old" and "Hocus Pocus", which makes me want to say, "Geez, maybe there was a better way to do this?" Like what if next October rolls around and I find that I can't put a solid chain together, and I've left all these horror films stranded and unlinkable? That's negative thinking, and not only do I not want to go there, I have to keep my eyes on the prize because the end of the year is in sight, and if I leave the path I'm on, who knows, the whole chain could fall apart and I won't be able to get to my Christmas movies as planned. Sure, now I realize I could follow the Philip Baker Hall link and get to "Coma" which would lead me to "Creepshow" and/or "Dead Ringers", but honestly, I don't have time to even consider an alternate path. I'm working every day this week and then on Saturday I'm supposed to get on a plane - so even if there WERE a better path, I don't have time to chart that course. At this point, the chain is what it is until December 25.
There are a lot of movies to watch between now and next October - I can't predict what else could also get added to the list before that. I'll just do what I do every year, put together the best possible chain I can from what got left behind.
THE PLOT: Newlyweds are terrorized by demonic forces after moving into a large house that was the site of a grisly mass murder a year before.
AFTER: This is my first film from the "Amityville Horror" franchise - and like any other franchise, it started with one movie, and then when it did well, somebody in Hollywood said, "Well, why can't it be TWO movies?" And then three, then a remake/reboot, and maybe a Netflix series a decade or so after that. Because if you just make one movie and call it a day, well, you're leaving money on the table. There are like a dozen horror movie franchises that I haven't even started on yet, like the "Halloween" films (shout out to Jamie Lee Curtis, who I saw in person at the New Yorker Festival this past weekend) and then "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm St."
But cable's running the original "Amityville Horror" film from 1979, with James Brolin and Margot Kidder, and I'm thinking I should record it for possible future inclusion, and then there's "Amityville II: The Possession" with a less stellar cast. But then, where do I draw the line, do I add "Amityville 3-D" and "Amityville: the Awakening" or just call it a day? Honestly, I have no idea. When should I put the "Halloween" and other missing franchises on my to-do list? I guess I'll work them in when I have time, or if I get an inkling that they're going to help me make my future connections.
I've tended to avoid the "haunted house" genre ever since I got roped into watching "Poltergeist" way back in 1983, and got the bejeebus scared out of me at the age of 14. After seeing the "produced by Steven Spielberg" credit, I was expecting something akin to "E.T.", and well, it just wasn't that at all. I found it very difficult to sleep for about a week, and now 40 years later, well, not that much has changed, except I don't take the scary movies quite as seriously. The Amityville franchise wears that "based on a true story" line like a badge of honor, but once you start reading about the real-life DeFeo murders that took place in 1974, you realize that probably there's no supernatural connection at all. It was just a guy with a broken brain who shot and killed his whole family. Case closed. There's just no reason to think that the spirits of his dead family had any influence over the house's future residents, or that the house was built on a Native American burial ground, or torture prison, this film kind of throws all that in for good measure, by way of explanation.
Something funny (unusual funny, not "ha ha" funny) happened during the recent pandemic, with the crime statistics. Most violent crimes - carjackings, muggings, bank robberies - were way down, which makes sense, nobody was going anywhere during lockdown. But the exception was the murder rate, which went up in 2020 and 2021. What gives? If everybody was at home, under lockdown or quarantine, the inevitable conclusion is that more people were killing their roommates or family members. Logically, this makes some sense, if people found that their relationships just couldn't survive close contact in small spaces for an extended period of time. All those little petty annoyances between spouses or parents and children, well, they build up, and if there's no school or work to go to, the effect is somewhat cumulative. And then in some cases, things boil over and you just want to KILL that person, metaphorically at first, but then...
In the end, what's more believable, that the spirits of the murdered children reached out from beyond the afterlife into the here and now to convince more people to kill, or a supernatural force that feeds off of human misery took up residence in one house's ventilation system, or that one imperfect human, who regularly used heroin and LSD, and had been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, was under a lot of pressure and somehow thought that killing family members would stop the imaginary voices in his head? I know what I believe, and it's the most likely answer. The direct motive for the killings might still be unclear, but Ronald DeFeo Jr. had a volatile relationship with his parents, and it was most likely added by the author of the original book, and then Hollywood compounded things with the movie. Obviously it benefited someone financially to do this, because there have been TWENTY-EIGHT films with "Amityville" in the title throughout the Amityville multiverse.
That being said, as we learned in "Last Night in Soho", nearly every house or flat in London has a checkered history, somebody probably died or was murdered in every room at some point, that's just statistics. When a real-estate agent sells a house on Long Island, or anywhere else, there's probably a little voice in their head repeating, "Don't mention the murder, don't mention the murder..." But then if they do, they might as well lean into it, because there is a contingent out there that might be MORE interested in living in a place where a violent crime happened. They say that lightning can't strike twice in the same place, but of course, it can. The top spire of any skyscraper has probably been hit by lightning thousands of times. So it's NOT the house, it's the people who live there next, but of course in the back of their minds, they may be looking for some excuse as to why they find themselves having dark thoughts, just like the previous residents.
George and Kathleen Lutz divorced in the 1990's, and both died in the mid-aughts. And Ronnie DeFeo died just last year, he'd been in prison ever since 1974, and the stories about the house have now taken on an (after-)life of their own, but let's get real, I say. I know, I know, I'm really no fun, but that's what I've done since I was a kid, try to separate fantasy from reality. The real house in question, on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, doesn't even have those two giant curving windows that look like demon (or pumpkin) eyes. The house used for the first two "Amityville Horror" films is in Toms River, NJ, sorry to burst everyone's bubble, and the one seen in this film is really in Wisconsin.
You can't have it both ways, in my opinion - you can't say this is "based on actual events" and then acknowledge that all the names and some of the facts had to be changed for legal reasons. Bottom line - if ghosts were real, and if a house could be haunted by one event enough to drive a second family to the brink of madness and murder, then there wouldn't be so many lawsuits after the fact about what the books and movies got right and got wrong. Just every little single detail about the Lutz's time in the notorious house is wrong here, right down to the fact that their dog actually survived the experience. Nice try, Hollywood, but I'm on to your tricks.
Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed"), Melissa George (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Jesse James (last seen in "Jumper"), Jimmy Bennett (last seen in "Shorts"), Rachel Nichols (last seen in "Alex Cross"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Isabel Conner, Brendan Donaldson (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Annabel Armour (last seen in "Contagion"), Danny McCarthy (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), José Taitano.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Alice Cooper and KISS posters
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