The Amityville Horror Blu-ray despite solid video and great audio falls short as an overall poor Blu-ray release
George and Kathy Lutz, a newly married couple with three children from Kathy's previous marriage, purchase a large house in Amityville, New York, where a multiple murder took place the year before. Strange things happen as soon as they move in. Father Delaney, Kathy's friend and priest, is stricken ill when he tries to bless the house, and he becomes convinced that Kathy and her family are in danger. The policeman who investigated the original murders notices an odd resemblance between George Lutz and the man convicted of those crimes. Based on a true story.
The original 1979 Amityville Horror is remembered with great affection by many who shrieked
as kids when they snuck into an R-rated showing. I mean no disrespect to their nostalgia when I
say that it's a dreadful film. Originally developed as a TV movie, the film is a heavily
fictionalized adaptation of the Jay Anson book recounting the purportedly true tale of the Lutz
family, who bought a haunted house on Long Island and fled after less than a month's residence.
The film was a box office success, mostly because of the much ballyhooed (and overstated) "true
life" background. It also probably didn't hurt that the trailer and ad campaign exploited the
Catholic iconography that so effectively sold horror films like The Exorcist and The Omen.
Today the best one can say of The Amityville Horror is that it's full of missed opportunities.
After all, if you're going to embellish the story for artistic purposes -- or even just for good old-fashioned scare-'em-out-of-their-seat entertainment -- why not do it well? The following year saw
the release of Kubrick's The
Shining, which also featured a building that bled from its walls, was
haunted by prior events and hosted a paranormal world. That edifice would also inspire a father
to attack his family with an axe, memorably hacking through a locked door to reach them.
Kubrick's scenes have became iconic, but Amityville's are laughable, because the story is too
incoherent to support them. Especially today, audiences require more than primitive physical
effects and the howling of a desperate priest.
The film's best scenes occur near the beginning. In the opening, claps of thunder alternate with
shotgun blasts as an entire family is murdered in a house in Amityville, Long Island, during a
torrential downpour. A year later, a real estate broker, Mrs. Townsend (Ida Straus, the clock
tower lady in Back to the Future), is showing the empty home to George and Kathy Lutz (James
Brolin, mountain-man hairy, and Margot Kidder, dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl). The Lutzes
are newlyweds, but it's Kathy's second marriage, and she has three kids. The absence of the
children's father is never explained; indeed, he's never even mentioned.
The house is being offered at a huge discount because of its gruesome history. As Mrs.
Townsend gives George and Kathy the tour, their scenes are intercut with abrupt and unsettling
flashbacks to the night of the murders. If the entire film had been conceived and executed with
the same degree of insight and craft, it could have been a classic.
Unfortunately, all cinematic inspiration ends when the Lutzes tell Mrs. Townsend they'll take the
place. From that point, the film proceeds on two neighboring tracks that go nowhere and barely
intersect. In one plot line, the Lutz family tries to adapt to their new life, as strange and uncanny
incidents multiply. Cold spots, odd noises, doors that open and close on their own, windows that
slam shut on hands (but without breaking bones), important objects that suddenly vanish and
ghostly apparitions are among the indicators of a haunting. Amy, Kathy Lutz's daughter and
youngest child, suddenly acquires a new "imaginary" friend, who appears to have malevolent
intentions. Among other things, she manages to imprison a terrified baby-sitter (Amy Wright) in
a closet with no lock on the door.
The strain takes its toll on George, or maybe it's the financial commitment. Either way, he looks
awful, and he neglects his struggling business (he's a land surveyor) to the point where his
partner, Jeff (Michael Sacks), drives out to Amityville with his wife, Carolyn (Helen Shaver), to
see what's going on. Carolyn, who is apparently psychic, is immediately terrified when she
approaches the house. But eventually Jeff persuades her to accompany him and the Lutzes inside,
where her instincts lead her to the same wall in the basement where the family dog has been
whining and pawing at the base. George hammers through, and they find a "red wall" that
reflects George's face back to them. Carolyn suddenly suffers a seizure or a possession, while a
strange voice issues from her declaring that they need to cover the gateway to hell.
And with that, Jeff and Carolyn disappear from both the scene and the movie, never to be
glimpsed, heard from or mentioned again. (Maybe they joined Kathy's ex-husband.) Meanwhile,
George and Kathy continue living in the house with Kathy's three children, because . . . well, just
because. Such is the casual indifference toward coherent storytelling with which The Amityville
Horror was constructed that scenes like the "red wall" happen, but the follow-up makes no
sense. The "true life" element requires that the entire family survive and flee the house at the end.
Everything in between is marking time.
That includes the film's second plot line. Intercut with the misadventures of the Lutz family is the
fretful tale of Father Delaney (Rod Steiger), Kathy's long-time priest. Knowing the house's
history, Kathy asked Father Delaney to stop by and bless their home on move-in day, and the
good father actually did so. But he arrived at just the right moment when every family member
happened to be out boating, so that the house's evil forces could mobilize against the devout
priest without any witnesses. As he tries to perform a blessing, Father Delaney is attacked by a
huge swarm of flies, suffers cramp and nausea, and hears a disembodied voice ordering him to
"get out!" Back at his church, he's afflicted by boils and a fever leaving him bedridden. Indeed,
the house afflicts any servant of the church who enters, as demonstrated when Kathy's aunt, a
nun (Irene Dailey), tries to visit.
Kathy never seems to notice that, once her family moves into the Amityville house, she never
again speaks to Father Delaney. All their phone calls are interrupted by mysterious static; the
church authorities (the reliable Murray Hamilton and John Larch) put the priest on leave rather
than entertain his theories about an "evil force" stalking the Lutzes; and shortly thereafter he's
mysteriously blinded while invoking a blessing surrounded by religious statues in an empty church.
The only person who contacts Kathy is Father Delaney's aide and former pupil, Father
Bolen (Don Stroud), who serves no discernible purpose in the story other than to look concerned.
Father Bolen doesn't believe his old teacher, even when their car goes wildly out of control for
no apparent reason, then flies apart in the middle of a busy road. (And why should this have
anything to do with the Lutz house, which they were nowhere near? The house's selectively long
reach is never explained.)
A potentially more useful contact is Sgt. Gionfriddo (Val Avery), the local cop who handled the
original murder case at the Amityville house and is watching the place now that a new family
lives there, with new reports of disturbances. He seeks out Father Delaney, but nothing comes of
the investigation. It's yet another red herring, because the cop has no real part in the story. (Nor
does anything come of various inquiries into the house's history or the murders a year ago.)
There'd be nothing wrong with the film's ending, in which the Lutzes abandon the house and
everything in it, if the rest of the film had been building to it. But the end only comes because the
two hours are up, and the film has spent them tossing out oddities and possible scenarios like a
frightfest variety pack. The same year that saw The Amityville Horror saw another R-rated film
that really scared audiences out of their seats, and it didn't open with a bang. For the better part
of an hour, it just showed viewers around its world and acquainted them with every little detail,
so that, when things started to go wrong, you knew what didn't fit and why you should be afraid
of it. That's the payoff when filmmakers do the serious spadework that a coherent narrative
requires. The film was Alien. The following year brought The Shining, as well as Dressed to Kill,
where Brian DePalma demonstrated that even a bored housewife's sexual frustration could, if
treated creatively, provide a solid narrative foundation for scaring an audience silly (though it's
arguable whether DePalma was able to sustain the effect through the entire film).
What these films have in common is their deliberate approach to narrative construction. However, they do assume a viewer
who comes to the theater and gives the film his or her undivided attention. That was still the
typical moviegoer in 1979, before both media and viewing had become as diversified and
fragmented as they are today. For such a viewer, good filmmakers had the confidence to provide
a thorough grounding in their world -- to give the audience information, as Hitchcock used to say
-- before scaring them through and through.
But a film like Amityville is still stuck in its made-for-TV origins -- and not just "TV", but TV as
it was then, before competition from pay- and basic-cable programs forced the networks to up
their game. All that was required was for something to happen between commercial breaks: a
ghostly manifestation, a family trauma, some sort of religious mania, and never mind whether it
connects to anything that happened before or after. Just keep telling everyone it's all true. Even
the parts that are made up.
Whatever one's opinion of the film, there is nothing to fault with the Blu-ray presentation of The
Amityville Horror, which doesn't necessarily mean every viewer will like it. What you get on the
1080p, AVC-encoded disc is an image much like you'd expect to see if you went to a movie
theater in 1979 to catch the latest release from American International Pictures, which was one of
the leading independent producers of the era. You didn't expect glossy, super-sharp images from
A.I.P., and you rarely got them. The Blu-ray's image is moderately grainy, but the grain looks
natural, neither artificially reduced nor digitally manipulated into odd patterns that "hang" or
"clump". Detail is sufficiently well-reproduced that you can always make out the fine patterns of
the terrible Seventies fashions and, in too many instances, the unconvincing makeup on James
Brolin and Rod Steiger.
Colors are natural-looking, though somewhat on the pale side. Black levels are generally good,
though night scenes and dark interiors sometimes look more gray than black, a phenomenon I
attribute more to the original photography than to "crushing". Compression artifacts were non-existent, as
this is fairly undemanding material.
The 5.1 remix, presented in DTS lossless, of the original mono soundtrack aggressively moves
specific sounds into the surround field and is surprisingly effective. Examples include the sound
of George Lutz chopping wood, the family dog barking, and various slamming doors. (It's the
isolation of these sounds that gives them such impact.) Major sound sequences like the opening
storm take full advantage of the multi-channel system to register their presence, while dialogue
remains anchored to the front (most of the time) and always clear. Bass extension is relatively
modest, which is undoubtedly a limitation of the source material. Lalo Schrifin's original score
supplies as much atmosphere as it can.
Is this a menu I see before me, the cursor toward my hand? Back in 2008, when Fox issued The
Amityville Horror for MGM on Blu-ray, it included a menu and allowed the user to resume
playback from the same point after stopping. The reissue due on Sept. 13, 2011 is expected to be
the same disc. Consider it a relic of a bygone day, before Fox decided to make MGM Blu-rays
less user-friendly.
Theatrical Trailer (HD; 1.85:1 2:29): It has wonderfully portentous narration and
makes
the film look far more coherent than it is.
Other Trailers (HD): The Terminator (1.85:1:57) ("You're dead, honey!") and Species
(2.35:1; 1:50) ("Outcome Unknown").
I can't recommend The Amityville Horror, because, despite the Blu-ray's technical merits, I don't
think the film is worth anyone's time (except maybe as a historical artifact). However, if it ranks
highly on your nostalgia scale, then I think this Blu-ray is about as good as it's going to get. I
recognize that at least one user review has suggested that a future version could improve on the
image, but I doubt it, unless -- and this could happen -- a new technology is created to synthesize a
brand new, clean, "ideal-def" version of a movie from a film scan. If that ever happened, it would
be the hi-def version of colorization, and I doubt it would be a favor to fans of Amityville. Some
things are only charming because they're old. The more clearly you see this movie, the harder
it'll be to overlook its considerable shortcomings.
Fox Home Entertainment in conjunction with MGM Home Entertainment has officially announced that they are bringing the 'Carrie' and 'Amityville Horror' to Blu-ray on October 7th. Both discs will come on BD-25s utilizing 1080p AVC video and a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio ...
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