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Movie 9- The Amityville Horror (2005)

Amityville movies are a bad movie guilty pleasure for me. The early ones made before this one are a collection of weird, often goofy movies that aren't generally very great but usually have a ton of something I love in B-horror, ghosts picking on people. The ones after this are almost universally a collection of stinkers but occasionally you get a really bad one that's almost hysterical in how poorly made it is, with The Amityville Haunting from 2011 in particular being basically the found footage horror version of The Room.

This movie is an in between that I hadn't seen since it came out in theaters. Revisiting it, I found that I didn't really like it; in fact, watching it kind of put me in a progressively more and more bad mood. The original Amityville Horror is no masterpiece in my opinion; it's kind of plodding and snoozy in parts and in my opinion if you want to hear the """true""" story of the Lutz family you're better off reading the novel, which is quick and pulpy. This movie, though, has the exact opposite problem. As soon as the family moves in from the word go there are ghosts running around in plain sight, the house is shitting blood everywhere, kids are repeatedly emperiled and rescued in scenes that feel like they were pulled from an action movie... It's a very loud, stupid movie that is throwing ghosts at your face as hard and as fast as possible rather than trying to build up any sort of atmosphere.

The best part of this movie is probably Ryan Reynolds. I am pretty neutral on him as an actor but he was interesting to watch in this because he doesn't usually play characters like this. The "dad going crazy" plot is not executed very well in this (the movie thinks you're so stupid that every time he leaves the house they make sure to have him say "WEIRD IM FEELING WAY BETTER NOW"), but he himself is surprisingly menacing and creepy in this movie for what it's worth.

In a way, despite my distaste for this film, it almost feels kind of ahead of its time. The thing it makes me think of the most is The Conjuring, which was pretty big in forging out the face of haunted house oriented horror after its release. Outside of a few good moments I don't really like those movies either though. I prefer either moody atmosphere or goofy weirdness to my ghost movies, so this isn't my cup of tea, but if you like things like The Conjuring or Insidious you might find this interesting as an early example of that style. 5/10