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A few weeks ago while I was working, a customer came up to me and said, "Do you know when the Amityville Horror is coming out on DVD?" Being the movie buff that I am, I quickly said, "Sure, October 4th." Gleefully he decided to tell me about how awesome the movie was. How the flick was scarier and more intense than the original, just like the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I believe I stopped listening at this point, but he continued to press on and on. So after screening the film on DVD this weekend, was it as the saying goes? Was the customer always right?

The answer, as you may have guessed, is no. This has to be one of the weakest horror efforts that has been slapped together lately. If it wasn't bad enough that just about every Japanese horror film has been remade here stateside since the success of The Ring, now we have to see mediocre American horror films being mass produced as well?

Ryan Reynolds stars as the patriarch of a family who just moved into the creepy old house by the lake. Oh and that house just happened to be where a family was murdered in their beds by their father just a year before. Welcome to spook central.

One basic element is necessary to make horror films work, without it they fail miserably. The horror has to have some context which the audience can connect with, a basis in reality so to speak. Whether it is cabin fever that drives a man crazy in an old Colorado Hotel or even a video tape which possesses the ghost of a killing little girl, there needs to be some basis for the scares. Amityville just throws disturbing images out to hopefully get a rise out of you. My favorite was when the littlest boy in the family just finished going to the bathroom and then a disfigured corpse appears from nowhere, without context, and drools out blood. Scary.

Well at least the acting was pretty good, right? Nope wrong again. While Reynolds did his best with the material, I completely agree with the sentiment that he was miscast. Van Wilder is not a scary guy, and when you have a wisecracking killer, he tends to gain the sympathy of the audience, not necessarily the fear. The rest of the family delivered decent performances, nailing some scenes and completely botching up other scenes with incredibly weak line delivery of terrible dialogue.

If there was any part of the movie that had any redeeming value it was the editing. It was incredibly tight and the transitions in the film, which was directed by Andrew Douglas, were well placed. In fact the only jump I got out of the whole movie was from a transition involving the chopping of wood.

So is Amityville worth the purchase? I suppose if you were a hardcore fan of the original, it might be worth a peak, but otherwise I'd recommend staying away from this DVD. In fact, I would avoid renting it too; it really just isn't worth the time or the money, unless you are in the mood for a good laugh, though I am sure that wasn't the intent of the film.

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