The Amityville Horror
''The Amityville Horror" is the latest cannibalization of a popular older horror film. But the movie that this remake is dining on wasn't fresh to begin with, so the new version appears to be suffering a terrible case of botulism.
Set in 1979, it's an incompetent retread of the equally inane 1979 hit. This time out, the intense comedic actor Ryan Reynolds turns nuts as George Lutz, a construction company owner with a grizzly beard, who sinks his savings into a hulking Long Island manor. He and his wife, Kathy (Melissa George), move in with their three kids, despite being told that the house may have driven a young man to shoot his entire family the year before.
The house, naturally, is haunted, in particular by a pallid little mischief-maker named Jodie, who could have crawled out of the well in ''The Ring." The youngest daughter of the previous occupants and the last to die, she becomes the imaginary friend of the Lutzes' girl, Chelsea (Chloe Grace Moretz). In Jodie's thrall, Chelsea locks the lusty stoner baby sitter in the closet and, later, climbs way up onto the roof of the house and tries to leap off. That's a ludicrous scene, but hardly the only one.
George, meanwhile, grows obsessed with his work in the basement (which amounts to sleeping on a sofa near the furnace) and becomes visibly annoyed with Kathy and the kids -- they're only his stepchildren. And they're all so child-actor precocious that you can hardly blame him. At 3:15 every morning (the time of the original murders), George awakes to find mayhem on the property. It's only a matter of scenes until he falls under the house's murderous spell and goes bats on his family.
Not content to remake an old, mediocre horror movie, this ''Amityville" takes its cues from current mediocre horror movies, too. This one is frightening only if you can't remember the last throwaway movie that leaned on all the same tricks. ''Amityville," whose makers swear it's actually based on the ''Amityville" book and a ''true story," employs the usual shorthand of nasty montages that stand in both for exposition and for the characters' points of view and move at express-train speed.
Andrew Douglas is the director of this new version (the action-director Michael Bay is the producer). Like every youngish hack stationed in the Siberia of Hollywood Horrorville, Douglas brings the noise and the dollar-bin ''gotcha" moments but is painfully ignorant of the craft of building suspense. Instead, we get a lot of dreary atmosphere and speaker-bruising effects. Still, Reynolds, in his increasing insanity, eventual ax-wielding, and frequent shirtlessness, is fun -- the kind of fun that boldly suggests a remake of ''The Shining" instead.
That's smart. The original ''Amityville," with James Brolin and Margot Kidder, was no prize. It failed both tests of decent horror from that period, being neither scary nor successfully allegorical. Was the movie about bad Catholics, white guilt about American Indians (don't ask), or the perils of home ownership? And what exactly was wrong with that house? The movie felt itself desperately under the influence of other horror films of its time, namely ''Rosemary's Baby," ''The Exorcist," and ''The Omen." It did have an outrageous saving grace, though: Rod Steiger as a priest, a psychotherapist, and a thunderous over-actor. But even that was shameful.
Had the remake gotten its act together and its story straight, an overhaul of the original could have been something worth tolerating. Oh, well.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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