Saturday Night Movie: The Amityville Horror (2005 DVD)

Saturday, November 05, 2005

For this week's Saturday night movie review, I am going to talk about the Amityville Horror, the new 2005 version. This movie is a remake of a popular movie from 1979 of the same name. It is the haunted house story probably to end all haunted house stories, and many might think because the movie is said to be based on true events that it is based on something that really happened. Some say it is, and some say it isn't.

According to Snopes, the story behind this house is true. There was a family killed on the premises, and the family shown in the movie, the Lutzes, did move into the house and leave it twenty eight days later, but that is all that is true. As for the haunting experiences, none of those did take place, and once the Lutzes moved out no future families experienced any odd supernatural phenomenon. The Lutzes are said to have planned the whole story with the houses previous owner.

Now onto the movie. As I mentioned, this movie is a remake of the earlier version, and when it comes to remakes I'm usually skeptical. When it comes to remakes, the original is usually better. I can say the same for sequels. There are exceptions to this. Aliens comes to mind. I think this sequel was better than the 1979 original, but some might disagree and say the first movie in the series was the best.

In the case of this movie, I say this version might have been a bit more gory than the original 1979, but for some reason that movie scared me more than this version did. There are a couple of scenes where I needed to turn away, but other than that this movie didn't scare me all that much. In fact, I found myself losing a bit of a focus when this movie was on. I did enjoy this movie, but I think the original was a classic, and you really can't mess with a classic film.

As I rented this on DVD, there was more features to it. Not only was there the movie itself, but we also had some special features that included deleted scenes, commentary, and two documentaries. One a behind the scenes look at the filming of the movie itself, and the other a behind the scenes look at the actual story of Amityville Horror talking about the murders that occurred in the house.

Although I do think the original was better, I did really think this was done well. They did some things different in this version than they did the original, and I think it was those differences that make this movie good. The movie was trying to find its own uniqueness about it. After watching the deleted scenes on the DVD, I found myself asking the question of why these weren't included. Yes, it might have been because of time constraints in the film, but these additional scenes might have made for a more full rounded movie in my mind. The majority of the deleted scenes were a lot scary than the scenes in the movie. Sometimes I wish there was a feature on DVD's where you could have these deleted scenes added where they go in the movie. Then you could watch the entire film as it was originally shot. Maybe sometime in the future this will happen. We will have to see.

My Rating:

To check this movie out for yourself, here is the new version available at Amazon as well as the original: The Amityville Horror (Widescreen Special Edition) and The Amityville Horror.