The Amityville Horror
The Amityville Horror
R | 27 July 1979 (USA)
The Amityville Horror Trailers

George Lutz, his wife Kathy, and their three children have just moved into a beautiful, and improbably cheap, Victorian mansion nestled in the sleepy coastal town of Amityville, Long Island. However, their dream home is concealing a horrific past and soon each member of the Lutz family is plagued with increasingly strange and violent visions and impulses.

Reviews
Cathardincu

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

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Borserie

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

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KnotStronger

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

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Jenna Walter

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

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meathookcinema

A young family move into a house where a young man killed his entire family. And they wonder why the house price was so low.Cue all manner of haunted house shenanigans- flies, crucifixes being turned upside down, the kids suddenly acquiring imaginary friends, red eyes being seen through the window at night, black ooze overflowing from the toilet...the list is endless.It feels like every camp and childish haunted house cliché has been poured into this movie that is actually based on a hoax. This sets the tone for the film.There are some funny moments though- watch out for the vomiting nun and the worst teeth brace you'll ever see. It looks like some kind of torture device.Also, Margot Kidder seems to be have some kind of naughty schoolgirl, proto Britney Spears vibe going on in this film. A bit pervy. Keep your fantasies in the bedroom, hun.

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thiszizlife

The fly scene with the priest will never get old. Then never resolves to anything substantial. We find something is disturbing the priest enough that he pukes outside by his car. Everything seems find for George and the gang. They had to have been drinking TAB soda as they were fixing up the place. Haven't seen that soda in a while. Love how Stuart Rosenberg adds in the old stuff, too. Them old school wall pencil sharpeners in the kitchen and, rotary phone. There is something about this place that George likes since, he buys one of the old lamps that broke during the murder that took place there. The dialogue for starters in this film is family-like. And Kathy and George are a trip. George gets cold and says. "This house is supposed to be well- insulated." Where did this line come from? Why inform us of this now and not when the realtor was present. Skipping ahead to the love scene, it could be better. I like how he looks at her and says, "Kathy, I love you." This also builds feeling in both characters and we see them as humans and we feel for them. Great job! Rosenberg. This film carries us through a destructive tide of disorder at its best. That family dinner table fight. That car argument with someone. I think we have all been there and can relate. Rosenberg knows this and does a great job of bringing this out during the babysitter closet scene. The real incident of this took place in New York, resident address of 112 Ocean Avenue. This did not take place in Detroit. This kind of ruins the authenticity factor. Yep, that went right out the door. And, there was no car being possessed in the original story. The use of atmosphere makes this film enjoyable. Some houses are just creepy and this is one of them. Those old houses with those stairway basements are just nasty! Kathy would be much better off with Father Bolen. This film suggests that. That we never really see the good until it's too late and we are stuck in marriage. A lot of this film sucks you into nothing happening scenes that could very well be omitted. Things start to pick up towards the end of the film and Rosenberg I think is at his best. Lot of unnecessary effects that steal the suspense. I would have loved the run through action in this film a lot better without the musical score. In a film like this you want to hear the screams, be involved in the tension build up of what's going on with the characters, and not detached from them by this music. The main theme in the credit roll would have been better if Rosenberg utilized it during George's walkarounds of the boathouse.

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Shawn Watson

I assume that audiences in the 1970s were naïve and easily scared. Between The Omen and this garbage traipsing in at the end of the decade it boggles my mind they are both so popular. I pair them together as they sort of share similar themes and prey upon weak minds to buy into their nonsense.There is truth to the Amityville Horror, but there is a LOT of conjecture and immeasurable amounts of fabrication. Yes, murders did take place there and the Lutz family who moved in afterwards claim that the hauntings they experienced were real, and they took that claim to their graves. The Lutz family signed off on allowing Jay Anson to write a novel based on their experiences only for him to embellish it with fiction. This movie is based on that book but further expands it with pure fantasy. Calling this awful film "based on truth" is like saying that The Human Centipede is based on Winnie the Pooh.The fictional George and Kathy Lutz move into 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York and hope to start a new chapter in their lives. But as soon as a priest (played by Rod Steiger who apparently has no idea he's slumming it in a static horror film) comes around to bless the place a poorly ADR-ed voice tells him to "GET OUT!". Not taking well to being menaced by amateurishly dubbed-on dialogue the priest flees the house and hides in the church while the movie infrequently cuts back to him overacting so outrageously it seems straight out of a Carry-On film.George and Kathy are puzzled why no contact can be made with Father Steiger. Little do they know it's because of "ghost powers" messing up the phone line. Their youngest child makes friends with an invisible pig called Jodie while George develops a bit of a short temper. The extent of the haunting doesn't push past this for much of the two- hour running time, a length this material (fiction or not) simply cannot sustain. Towards the end the walls bleed and crosses on the wall go upside down. Wow! Scary! George also cannot find money that's been lost in the living room. This would be low-wattage drama even for a 1970s episode of Crossroads.On the final night George goes mad and preempts The Shining by hacking through the bathroom door with an axe while his wife and children panic. He comes to his senses, they flee, but not before George gets gunged in a remarkably unterrifying moment straight out of Noel's House Party.The Lutz family have never went into detail about what really happened on that final night, but ANYTHING would have been better than this. There is so much opportunity to make a frightening and classic horror film out of this premise and it's all fumbled by hack director Stuart Rosenberg who handles the material with all of the credibility of a cheap TV movie. The "house with eyes" motif is all he has going for him and boy does he overdo it. The atmosphere is flat and boring when the true story had much more potential. We see Ronald Defeo murder his family in the beginning, a scene which is correctly labelled as being November 1974. Then we cut to one year later when the Lutz family examine the house. Then we cut ahead another month to the correct date of December 1975 for their brief 28-day tenure. The movie is clearly shot during an Indian summer, the Christmas atmosphere is non- existent. What a joke! Stuart Rosenberg just wanted a paycheck, the actual quality of the movie meant nothing to him.The Amityville Horror is a drag - a boring, amateurish slog through unimaginative horror tropes that seem quaint and dated by today's standards. It should rightly be forgotten, though as George Lutz himself said, when compared to the 2005 Michael Bay film the 1979 camp-fest is like a "goddamn documentary".

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gwnightscream

James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger star in this 1979 horror film based on the book. This begins on a rainy night with a family being murdered. One year later, we meet George (Brolin) and Kathy Lutz (Kidder) who move into the same house with their 3 young children where the terrible incident took place. Soon, strange things occur and George starts behaving differently. George and Kathy discover that their house is haunted by an evil spirit of one of the deceased family members trying to possess them. The late, Steiger (End of Days) plays Priest, Father Delaney. This is a good horror flick with a decent cast and creepy effects. I recommend this for horror fans.

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