THE DUKE ON
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR 2005
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR 2005
Let’s be all the honest in the world. Ever since the masterful,
inexplicably underrated Amityville II – The Possession, that funky
house at 112 Ocean Avenue has been dragged through all sortsa crud
and pish and spittle. There’s been the occasional lifeline flung at
those iconic windows here and there, maybe in the shape of
Amityville 4 – The Evil Escapes, or Amityville Dollhouse, but for
all the creepy moments or cool effects over the past two decades, a
man can’t help but wish someone would give that house a nice toucha
paint and restore it to something approaching former glories.
I ain’t asking for miracles. I know an Amityville II – The
Possession is totally out the fucking question, but maybe something
somewheres between Amityville 3D and the original Amityville
Horror? I mean come on, the climate is perfect for an Amityville 9
that shreds the bejeesus outta, say, Amityville 1992. Something
that owes a touch to all that Asian fare, something that reeks of
Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others, something freaky and unsettling.
Folks dig this kinda shit nowadays. Give me The Ring, these
audiences are hollering. I want my horror blue as fuck and all
subtle hints and discomforting glances. Shove your maniac axe-saw
murders up your filthy stinking cack-hole. Scare me shitless with a
reflection, would you ever?
What happened, you may be aware, is something along the lines of
The Man decided “Fuck that Amityville 9 malarkey” and went back to
the source. Let’s do a big remake of The Amityville Horror, The Man
announced.
This is a great idea for several reasons, most of which are
something along the lines of the following;
The Amityville Horror 1979 isn’t an especially great flick. For
sure, it’s got moments of giddy delight scattered around, like
Margot Kidder’s ridiculously revealing night-dress, or James
Brolin's ridiculously unkempt facial hair, or Rod Steiger Versus A
Buncha Flies, but overall it’s a bit slight.
If you’re gonna remake an incredibly successful seventies horror
flick, best remake one that didn’t quite nail it in the first
place. The fuck can be the thinking behind remaking The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre or Dawn Of The Dead? Those sons a bitches nailed the
bastards. Go grab something that could’ve been fixed up here and
there.
And keep your stinking fingers off of Amityville 2. No-one will
ever utter “You wanna smoke, priest?” with anything approaching the
hard-ass majesty of Burt Young.
So this new-fangled Amityville Horror shows up in theatres, and a
fella gets a chance for to see if they done fixed what was wrong,
without fucking up what was fine.
A couple surprises lay in wait.
For one thing, as a young fella, The Duke used to be quite the fan
of Melissa George, an Australian actress who played a character by
the name of Angel in Aussie soap-opera Home And Away. Let me state
for the record, The Duke was very, very fond of Melissa George.
Next thing I know, she’s in Amityville 2005, looking not one day
older than she did back in 1943 or whenever it was Home And Away
was something I watched of an evening. More than this, there’s a
filthing scene half-way in that a fella would’ve paid cold hard
cash for to see in Home And Away back in the day, maybe just after
Alf and Elsa had a “barney” about some cock or other concerning
“The surf-shop”.
No matter, I pretty much appreciated it here and now, decade late
as it was. There was plenty shuffling in the seats. A fella done
shuffled himself and crossed legs and so on, whilst all the time
trying not to draw attention to the shuffling and crossing of legs
to the fella sitting next to me.
Melissa George is wonderful, is the truth of the matter, and not
just because she’s gorgeous, which she is, if, let’s face it, she’s
no Kirsten, but also because she’s a great actress. Also, and
importantly for this kinda venture, she’s got just the right mix of
slightly-vulnerable but fucking hard as nails when the need arises.
She’s the kinda lass folks might describe as “Girl Next Door”, and
we all think about what the fuck council estate does this man live
in, anyhow, and how the fuck can I get a flat there?
And she’s pretty much responsible for why the filthing scene is far
more compelling than it was back in 1979. No offence Lois, but
unless you’re Lucinda Williams or the woman out The Graduate then
the much older lady thing doesn’t really work for The Duke, and
even though you were young back then, how can a man think sinful
thoughts when there’s a contemporary interview just a couple clicks
away that reminds him of the passing of time and the lifting of
faces and the cruelty of existence?
However, if maybe you’re a female, or maybe a homosexual, then most
likely Melissa George ain’t gonna be enough for you. I wanna see me
some masculine curves, muscles, beards etc, you’ll be saying.
Let me tell you this for the price of a second spent reading;
For all the money flung on flinging creepy young ladies and long-
demented screaming bleeding spectres around the place, seems that
what director Andrew Douglas most wants us to think about is Ryan
Reynolds. I don’t believe I’ve saw a man’s torso get so much
attention in a non-“genre” flick since at least Commando or some
shit. Every opportunity, Ryan’s gonna rip the shirt off and wander
around with an axe, do some wood-choppin, take a wander down by the
boat-house.
Muscles and sweat and boats. You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d
walked into a screening of Sergei Eisenstien’s Battleship Potemkin
by mistake. We can only assume Douglas has been watching plenty
soviet cinema in the past couple months.
But aside from the soviet influences and the gazing upon the bodies
of the two leads, the new fangled Amityville also takes a couple
cues from The Sixth Sense. You’d wonder how The Sixth Sense has any
motherfucking cues left, what with the number of pictures stealing
them and lifting them and leaving them laying around of late. Where
the fuck’s all my bastard cues gone, it hollers to no-one in
particular. I went to grab a cue this morning, ain’t a bastard cue
to be found.
But Amityville 2005 still managed to find a couple, and so instead
of piling on “atmosphere” and “subtle freaky shit” for to jangle
our nerves akimbo, we get loads of shots of “The Ghosts.” Sometimes
it’s a little girl with her face all blue and big black eyes and
lots of veins. Other times it’s maybe a weird motherfucker who
looks a bit like the fella from off the video cover for Wes Craven
Presents Mind Ripper. Whatever or whoever it is, we can only assume
the thinking was something along the lines of; No sense hinting at
things when, fuck it, we can just throw The Ghosts all over the
place.
I. the hell E, you might remember the bit in the original when the
babysitter gets locked in the closet. There’s all sorts a screaming
and shouting, but we don’t see no silly ghost lass crawling about
the ceiling or anything tacky like that. The door shuts, and holy
fuck, this fucking door won’t open. What the hell’s going on here,
anyroad?
Nowadays, what happens is the babysitter goes into the closet and
before a fella knows what the sweet fuck is going on, there’s a
ghost girl doing freaky shit, maybe standing behind the babysitter,
maybe crawling cross the ceiling. Who knows what she’ll do next,
this freaky little ghost girl from out The Sixth Sense?
Instead of having the rocking chair rock back and fourth on its
own, we’ll have a ghost sitting on it, in case folks are thinking
about why the fucks the rocking chair rocking when ain’t no arse to
be seen? Now they know it’s cause of a ghost, and not some screw-up
in the flooring.
What this leads to, though, is something along the lines of a shift
with regards The Blame. In the original, the house was the
oppressive beast, the house was alive, and thudding and burping and
bleeding and all sortsa wacky zany horse shit. It was more in
keeping with the likes of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, and whilst
Amityville 2005 is nowhere near as wretched as The Haunting 1999,
and is actually fairly pleasing, it still loses something by
shifting the focus away from the building itself to the physical
manifestation of ghosts an ghoulies an otherworldly ne’er-do-wells.
Back in the day, even the wallpaper was scary, since not only was
it a horrible late-seventies design, but also, the wallpaper is
part of this evil mass of bricks and mortar and Satan spunk. The
house in Amityville 2005 could be any house, any place. Sure, it
has the freaky windows, but it doesn’t feel like a character the
way it did back in 1979. Now what you wanna be scared of is the
freaky ghost girl. Who the fuck cares about the stairs or the
wallpaper or the pipes when there’s a freaky ghost girl running
around with a freaky one-eyed teddy-bear.
Incidentally, this is the same teddy bear that played Mr Burns’
teddy-bear in that episode of The Simpsons when he lost his Bobo.
Y'know, with the one hanging out and so on.
So the house is wasted, but if you’re thinking something along the
lines of, “Well fuck that rancid arse then. The hell I wanna be
lookin’ at that house-wasting travesty for?” then you need to take
into account a little known cinematic critical theory along the
lines of The Comedy de la Madman.
Ryan Reynolds is the latest in a long line of brilliant comedy
madmen, from Dr Pretorius in Bride Of Frankenstein to Cagliostro in
The Erotic Adventures Of Frankenstein to Christian Slater in The
Shining right up to Johnny Depp’s wonderfully bed-headed flick-
salvaging turn in The Secret Window. Reynolds is just a joy to
behold, all darting eyes and sneering sarcasm and threatening
beards. He also manages to turn in Jason Lee’s best comedy
performance since Mallrats. Good work Reynolds.
Also, things get plenty tense on occasion.
There are many, many, many “jump” moments throughout the affair,
but 94% of them are nothing less than soulless, lazy wastes of
adrenaline. Any fool can shout “ARGH” loud enough in the middle of
a quiet bit for to make a fella jump, but it doesn’t mean anything.
You didn’t earn that jump, you son of a bitch, not one fucking
inch. The Wayans Brothers tickle you enough they’ll make you laugh,
don’t make them comedy geniuses. Makes them a couple annoying sons
a bitches turning out shoddy pishy bafflingly popular bollocks who
are running their fingers real fast underneath your arms.
However the hell, there are moments when Amityville 2005 delivers a
thrill that it had to work for, and a fella feels neither shame nor
resentment when getting suitably white-knuckle about it all. When
Ryan Reynolds demands that his step-son hold another fucking piece
of wood up so he can drive an axe down the motherfucker with the
fury of a man demented on the whiskey-cracks, you tense up, and
rightly so. Look at the young fella, all teary-eyed and shaking and
saying about “Don’t make me hold no more wood for you to fling axes
into”, and yet there’s Reynolds, smiling and saying about “Don’t
you be talking no pussy-ass shit, now, y’hear?”
All the shitty little jump moments earlier are like when you want a
new toaster so you just walk into a store and lift it the fuck off
the shelf, take it home and spend the day sticking CD’s into it
just cause you can. These Reynolds-related chills are something
altogether more substantial, like maybe you wanted a toaster and
you work all your life in a TB-riddled nickelodeon for to get the
change scrabbled together, and then when you finally get your hands
on that bread-encrustening wonder, you treat it like it were your
only child, a child by the name of Toast-Face, a child you’ll
cherish till the day your guts fall out your arsehole on account of
some exotic disease of some kind.
And this is all without mentioning how fun the whole affair is. For
sure, it’s bizarre as fuck that a flick concerning the real-life
murder of a family, and then presenting the real-life murdered
daughter as a kooky ghost-lass, gets off with such delirious
trivialising of children being shot-gunned in their beds, but for
some reason it does. Amityville is such a staple of pop culture
that it doesn’t seem any more connected to a real-life tragedy than
Alive or Star Wars Part 2 – The Empire Strikes Back. There’s plenty
debate about whether or not ghosts and freaky wallpaper and
bleeding taps ever surfaced in the real-life house, but there’s no
disputing that folks were killed prior to such wacky antics, and
that one of those dead children is now propping up the SFX budget
of a haunted house picture with Angel out Home And Away.
Even Amityville II – The Possession had the decency to change the
names. Mind you, it still deemed the murderer innocent in the long
run. Turns out it was the screeching octopus beast under his face
that was responsible. I think that’s probably how O.J got off too.
But Amityville II has no part in a discussion of The Amityville
Horror 2005, except to say yeah, Amityville 2005 is a lotta fun,
and at least as good as Amityville Horror 1979, but if it thinks it
has a chance of even swiping the pus-riddled coat-tails of
Amityville II – The Possession, it can think the fuck again.
Amityville II had incest and abuse and the second-best Invisible
Other in all horror cinema, just behind Evil Dead. It had two heart-
stoppingly brilliant set-pieces, namely the psychedelic, skinny-
ribbed possession sequence, and the lightening-pierced room-to-room
slaughter. Amityville 2005 has a heart-stopping filth sequence, a
couple great jumps, a thousand weedy ones, and plenty wonderful
comedy psychosis from Ryan Reynolds.
Which is, nonetheless, more than can be said for The Amityville
Curse.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
inexplicably underrated Amityville II – The Possession, that funky
house at 112 Ocean Avenue has been dragged through all sortsa crud
and pish and spittle. There’s been the occasional lifeline flung at
those iconic windows here and there, maybe in the shape of
Amityville 4 – The Evil Escapes, or Amityville Dollhouse, but for
all the creepy moments or cool effects over the past two decades, a
man can’t help but wish someone would give that house a nice toucha
paint and restore it to something approaching former glories.
I ain’t asking for miracles. I know an Amityville II – The
Possession is totally out the fucking question, but maybe something
somewheres between Amityville 3D and the original Amityville
Horror? I mean come on, the climate is perfect for an Amityville 9
that shreds the bejeesus outta, say, Amityville 1992. Something
that owes a touch to all that Asian fare, something that reeks of
Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others, something freaky and unsettling.
Folks dig this kinda shit nowadays. Give me The Ring, these
audiences are hollering. I want my horror blue as fuck and all
subtle hints and discomforting glances. Shove your maniac axe-saw
murders up your filthy stinking cack-hole. Scare me shitless with a
reflection, would you ever?
What happened, you may be aware, is something along the lines of
The Man decided “Fuck that Amityville 9 malarkey” and went back to
the source. Let’s do a big remake of The Amityville Horror, The Man
announced.
This is a great idea for several reasons, most of which are
something along the lines of the following;
The Amityville Horror 1979 isn’t an especially great flick. For
sure, it’s got moments of giddy delight scattered around, like
Margot Kidder’s ridiculously revealing night-dress, or James
Brolin's ridiculously unkempt facial hair, or Rod Steiger Versus A
Buncha Flies, but overall it’s a bit slight.
If you’re gonna remake an incredibly successful seventies horror
flick, best remake one that didn’t quite nail it in the first
place. The fuck can be the thinking behind remaking The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre or Dawn Of The Dead? Those sons a bitches nailed the
bastards. Go grab something that could’ve been fixed up here and
there.
And keep your stinking fingers off of Amityville 2. No-one will
ever utter “You wanna smoke, priest?” with anything approaching the
hard-ass majesty of Burt Young.
So this new-fangled Amityville Horror shows up in theatres, and a
fella gets a chance for to see if they done fixed what was wrong,
without fucking up what was fine.
A couple surprises lay in wait.
For one thing, as a young fella, The Duke used to be quite the fan
of Melissa George, an Australian actress who played a character by
the name of Angel in Aussie soap-opera Home And Away. Let me state
for the record, The Duke was very, very fond of Melissa George.
Next thing I know, she’s in Amityville 2005, looking not one day
older than she did back in 1943 or whenever it was Home And Away
was something I watched of an evening. More than this, there’s a
filthing scene half-way in that a fella would’ve paid cold hard
cash for to see in Home And Away back in the day, maybe just after
Alf and Elsa had a “barney” about some cock or other concerning
“The surf-shop”.
No matter, I pretty much appreciated it here and now, decade late
as it was. There was plenty shuffling in the seats. A fella done
shuffled himself and crossed legs and so on, whilst all the time
trying not to draw attention to the shuffling and crossing of legs
to the fella sitting next to me.
Melissa George is wonderful, is the truth of the matter, and not
just because she’s gorgeous, which she is, if, let’s face it, she’s
no Kirsten, but also because she’s a great actress. Also, and
importantly for this kinda venture, she’s got just the right mix of
slightly-vulnerable but fucking hard as nails when the need arises.
She’s the kinda lass folks might describe as “Girl Next Door”, and
we all think about what the fuck council estate does this man live
in, anyhow, and how the fuck can I get a flat there?
And she’s pretty much responsible for why the filthing scene is far
more compelling than it was back in 1979. No offence Lois, but
unless you’re Lucinda Williams or the woman out The Graduate then
the much older lady thing doesn’t really work for The Duke, and
even though you were young back then, how can a man think sinful
thoughts when there’s a contemporary interview just a couple clicks
away that reminds him of the passing of time and the lifting of
faces and the cruelty of existence?
However, if maybe you’re a female, or maybe a homosexual, then most
likely Melissa George ain’t gonna be enough for you. I wanna see me
some masculine curves, muscles, beards etc, you’ll be saying.
Let me tell you this for the price of a second spent reading;
For all the money flung on flinging creepy young ladies and long-
demented screaming bleeding spectres around the place, seems that
what director Andrew Douglas most wants us to think about is Ryan
Reynolds. I don’t believe I’ve saw a man’s torso get so much
attention in a non-“genre” flick since at least Commando or some
shit. Every opportunity, Ryan’s gonna rip the shirt off and wander
around with an axe, do some wood-choppin, take a wander down by the
boat-house.
Muscles and sweat and boats. You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d
walked into a screening of Sergei Eisenstien’s Battleship Potemkin
by mistake. We can only assume Douglas has been watching plenty
soviet cinema in the past couple months.
But aside from the soviet influences and the gazing upon the bodies
of the two leads, the new fangled Amityville also takes a couple
cues from The Sixth Sense. You’d wonder how The Sixth Sense has any
motherfucking cues left, what with the number of pictures stealing
them and lifting them and leaving them laying around of late. Where
the fuck’s all my bastard cues gone, it hollers to no-one in
particular. I went to grab a cue this morning, ain’t a bastard cue
to be found.
But Amityville 2005 still managed to find a couple, and so instead
of piling on “atmosphere” and “subtle freaky shit” for to jangle
our nerves akimbo, we get loads of shots of “The Ghosts.” Sometimes
it’s a little girl with her face all blue and big black eyes and
lots of veins. Other times it’s maybe a weird motherfucker who
looks a bit like the fella from off the video cover for Wes Craven
Presents Mind Ripper. Whatever or whoever it is, we can only assume
the thinking was something along the lines of; No sense hinting at
things when, fuck it, we can just throw The Ghosts all over the
place.
I. the hell E, you might remember the bit in the original when the
babysitter gets locked in the closet. There’s all sorts a screaming
and shouting, but we don’t see no silly ghost lass crawling about
the ceiling or anything tacky like that. The door shuts, and holy
fuck, this fucking door won’t open. What the hell’s going on here,
anyroad?
Nowadays, what happens is the babysitter goes into the closet and
before a fella knows what the sweet fuck is going on, there’s a
ghost girl doing freaky shit, maybe standing behind the babysitter,
maybe crawling cross the ceiling. Who knows what she’ll do next,
this freaky little ghost girl from out The Sixth Sense?
Instead of having the rocking chair rock back and fourth on its
own, we’ll have a ghost sitting on it, in case folks are thinking
about why the fucks the rocking chair rocking when ain’t no arse to
be seen? Now they know it’s cause of a ghost, and not some screw-up
in the flooring.
What this leads to, though, is something along the lines of a shift
with regards The Blame. In the original, the house was the
oppressive beast, the house was alive, and thudding and burping and
bleeding and all sortsa wacky zany horse shit. It was more in
keeping with the likes of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, and whilst
Amityville 2005 is nowhere near as wretched as The Haunting 1999,
and is actually fairly pleasing, it still loses something by
shifting the focus away from the building itself to the physical
manifestation of ghosts an ghoulies an otherworldly ne’er-do-wells.
Back in the day, even the wallpaper was scary, since not only was
it a horrible late-seventies design, but also, the wallpaper is
part of this evil mass of bricks and mortar and Satan spunk. The
house in Amityville 2005 could be any house, any place. Sure, it
has the freaky windows, but it doesn’t feel like a character the
way it did back in 1979. Now what you wanna be scared of is the
freaky ghost girl. Who the fuck cares about the stairs or the
wallpaper or the pipes when there’s a freaky ghost girl running
around with a freaky one-eyed teddy-bear.
Incidentally, this is the same teddy bear that played Mr Burns’
teddy-bear in that episode of The Simpsons when he lost his Bobo.
Y'know, with the one hanging out and so on.
So the house is wasted, but if you’re thinking something along the
lines of, “Well fuck that rancid arse then. The hell I wanna be
lookin’ at that house-wasting travesty for?” then you need to take
into account a little known cinematic critical theory along the
lines of The Comedy de la Madman.
Ryan Reynolds is the latest in a long line of brilliant comedy
madmen, from Dr Pretorius in Bride Of Frankenstein to Cagliostro in
The Erotic Adventures Of Frankenstein to Christian Slater in The
Shining right up to Johnny Depp’s wonderfully bed-headed flick-
salvaging turn in The Secret Window. Reynolds is just a joy to
behold, all darting eyes and sneering sarcasm and threatening
beards. He also manages to turn in Jason Lee’s best comedy
performance since Mallrats. Good work Reynolds.
Also, things get plenty tense on occasion.
There are many, many, many “jump” moments throughout the affair,
but 94% of them are nothing less than soulless, lazy wastes of
adrenaline. Any fool can shout “ARGH” loud enough in the middle of
a quiet bit for to make a fella jump, but it doesn’t mean anything.
You didn’t earn that jump, you son of a bitch, not one fucking
inch. The Wayans Brothers tickle you enough they’ll make you laugh,
don’t make them comedy geniuses. Makes them a couple annoying sons
a bitches turning out shoddy pishy bafflingly popular bollocks who
are running their fingers real fast underneath your arms.
However the hell, there are moments when Amityville 2005 delivers a
thrill that it had to work for, and a fella feels neither shame nor
resentment when getting suitably white-knuckle about it all. When
Ryan Reynolds demands that his step-son hold another fucking piece
of wood up so he can drive an axe down the motherfucker with the
fury of a man demented on the whiskey-cracks, you tense up, and
rightly so. Look at the young fella, all teary-eyed and shaking and
saying about “Don’t make me hold no more wood for you to fling axes
into”, and yet there’s Reynolds, smiling and saying about “Don’t
you be talking no pussy-ass shit, now, y’hear?”
All the shitty little jump moments earlier are like when you want a
new toaster so you just walk into a store and lift it the fuck off
the shelf, take it home and spend the day sticking CD’s into it
just cause you can. These Reynolds-related chills are something
altogether more substantial, like maybe you wanted a toaster and
you work all your life in a TB-riddled nickelodeon for to get the
change scrabbled together, and then when you finally get your hands
on that bread-encrustening wonder, you treat it like it were your
only child, a child by the name of Toast-Face, a child you’ll
cherish till the day your guts fall out your arsehole on account of
some exotic disease of some kind.
And this is all without mentioning how fun the whole affair is. For
sure, it’s bizarre as fuck that a flick concerning the real-life
murder of a family, and then presenting the real-life murdered
daughter as a kooky ghost-lass, gets off with such delirious
trivialising of children being shot-gunned in their beds, but for
some reason it does. Amityville is such a staple of pop culture
that it doesn’t seem any more connected to a real-life tragedy than
Alive or Star Wars Part 2 – The Empire Strikes Back. There’s plenty
debate about whether or not ghosts and freaky wallpaper and
bleeding taps ever surfaced in the real-life house, but there’s no
disputing that folks were killed prior to such wacky antics, and
that one of those dead children is now propping up the SFX budget
of a haunted house picture with Angel out Home And Away.
Even Amityville II – The Possession had the decency to change the
names. Mind you, it still deemed the murderer innocent in the long
run. Turns out it was the screeching octopus beast under his face
that was responsible. I think that’s probably how O.J got off too.
But Amityville II has no part in a discussion of The Amityville
Horror 2005, except to say yeah, Amityville 2005 is a lotta fun,
and at least as good as Amityville Horror 1979, but if it thinks it
has a chance of even swiping the pus-riddled coat-tails of
Amityville II – The Possession, it can think the fuck again.
Amityville II had incest and abuse and the second-best Invisible
Other in all horror cinema, just behind Evil Dead. It had two heart-
stoppingly brilliant set-pieces, namely the psychedelic, skinny-
ribbed possession sequence, and the lightening-pierced room-to-room
slaughter. Amityville 2005 has a heart-stopping filth sequence, a
couple great jumps, a thousand weedy ones, and plenty wonderful
comedy psychosis from Ryan Reynolds.
Which is, nonetheless, more than can be said for The Amityville
Curse.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
