The Amityville Horror

Apr 12, 2005
Submitted by: Roslyn Hessling

'The Amityville Horror Collection'

With Andrew Douglas's remake of "The Amityville Horror" set to open on Friday, MGM Home Entertainment has packaged Stuart Rosenberg's original 1979 film with its first two sequels, Damiano Damiani's "Amityville II: The Possession" (1982) and Richard Fleischer's "Amityville 3-D" (1983), into a handsome box set that should more than satisfy anyone's lust for spooky happenings in Long Island homes.

Even with the considerable embroidery brought to the "true story" by Jay Anson, the author of the 1977 bestseller that launched the series, the 1979 film still seems more like "The Amityville Mild Annoyance," with its procession of supernaturally induced inconveniences settling on George and Kathy Lutz (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) when they move into a 19th-century house where a mass murder occurred years earlier. Presumably, the new film will provide more of the digitally enhanced pandemonium that audiences have come to expect from horror movies.

The best film of the bunch is the frankly exploitive "Amityville 3-D" (presented here in its 2-D form, a blessing if only because home video still can't effectively handle the 3-D format), which imagines a fresh story about a skeptical magazine reporter (Tony Roberts, momentarily free of Woody Allen) who acquires the Amityville house for a song and then finds out why.

While the furniture flies and swarms of demonic bees buzz into the camera, the unflinching Mr. Fleischer (a genre veteran whose work includes "The Vikings," from 1958) lays down a surprisingly realistic psychological subtext, suggesting that the ghostly manifestations are somehow related to the tension between Mr. Roberts's character and his bitterly estranged ex-wife (Tess Harper, whose performance is the most frightening thing in the picture). A strong supporting cast includes Robert Joy, Candy Clark and Meg Ryan, playing the saucy best friend of Mr. Roberts's teenage daughter in her second film appearance.

The "Amityville" remake will apparently be the last film released by MGM, now that the studio (or its own ghostly remains) has been bought by Sony and is being absorbed into that company's Columbia Pictures subdivision. One hopes that this won't mean the end of MGM Home Entertainment as well. This plucky outfit has produced some fine releases over the years, mining the offbeat MGM library (the most famous MGM titles went to Warner Brothers, via Ted Turner, many years ago) for B-movie gems like Edgar G. Ulmer's "Man from Planet X" (1951) and Roger Corman's "Masque of the Red Death" (1964).

The "Amityville Horror Collection" also contains a fourth disc consisting of two credulous History Channel documentaries, "Amityville: The Haunting" and "Amityville: Horror or Hoax?," making the set a pretty good deal at $39.96. The first and second features are rated R; "Amityville 3-D" is rated PG.

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