The Amityville Horror -1979- The Amityville Horror -2005- -Two-Pack-

Product Description There's no place like home...for blood-curdling horror! One of the world's most famous haunted houses takes a terrorific turn in The Amityville Horror (James Brolin. 1979/119 min.). Keep the lights on for the contemporary remake, The Amityville Horror (Ryan Reynolds. 2005/89 min.) and you'll have a demonic night of d+ªj+  vu! 2 DVDs. Color/R. Amazon.com Based on a bestselling, allegedly nonfiction book about haunted goings-on in a Long Island house ( The Amityville Horror Conspiracy), this rather cheesy horror movie is more silly than unsettling. James Brolin and Margot Kidder star as newlyweds who move into the empty home and are gradually affected by the legacy of a murder committed on the premises. Rod Steiger is a priest who can tell what's up and gets dispatched in a rather ugly way. Director Stuart Rosenberg can't lift the action above a certain level of tawdriness, and the audience ends up watching the horror from a distance instead of feeling involved. In the wake of The Exorcist, this 1979 spooker seemed like a no-brainer knockoff--and still does. -- Tom Keogh Most horror movies establish an atmosphere of normalcy, which they gradually rupture with spooky or creepy or stomach-churning images. The Amityville Horror--a remake of the 1979 movie about a possessed house that torments the family that moves into it--tosses normalcy out the window in the first five minutes, unleashing a nonstop barrage of unsettling camera angles, decaying wood and stained wallpaper, half-glimpsed shadows in motion, fast edits of grotesque ghosts, and dozens of other horror-movie devices. Whether you like the movie will depend on whether you like feeling slightly nauseated and cut off from any semblance of reality--for many people, that's why they go to horror movies. Others won't be able to suspend disbelief that anyone but an actor would spend the time necessary to develop Ryan Reynold's insanely buff physique, prominently displayed as he runs around wearing nothing but a pair of loose-fitting pajama bottoms. In addition to Reynolds (Van Wilder, Blade: Trinity), the movie also features Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia) and Melissa George (Down With Love). --Bret Fetzer