In the bright light of day, the house in Amityville is a lovely three-story building surrounded by a well-kept green lawn. But it’s for sale at a very low price, because its previous owners died a horrible death. The house is bought by a young married couple with three children, Kathleen and George Lutz.

The happy owners ask the local priest, Father Delaney, to consecrate their new home, but a sudden illness prevents him from completing the ceremony. And the Lutz family remains in their “dream house,” where strange and frightening events begin to occur. Every rustle in the night brings unspeakable horror to the inhabitants of the house.

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The Amityville Horror is a classic of the world horror, and in particular of its ‘haunting house’ variety, which played a huge role in the development of the aforementioned genre and started a very important franchise. The picture is designed to show the viewer in all its glory a sinister house, which is the concentration of evil, that is the main negative force. However, this work, frankly, coped with the above-mentioned task rather poorly and turned out to be rather silly. The movie direction cannot please much, there is a weak staging, boring dialogues and not dynamic plot.

The movie begins with a rather trivial house buying, automatically excluding a competent prologue, which had a place in the remake. It shows complicated family relations and focuses on inappropriate business and some kind of banquets, blurring the impression of the movie and complicating the already poorly realized plot with unnecessary details. The whole action of the movie develops extremely tediously and stretches for almost two useless hours. The director’s attempt to make a multifaceted work and to present different aspects of family life to the audience fails miserably, which mainly causes a question: how did the movie manage to gather such a box office?

The house with all its inherent negative force and energy is shown rather grey and causes almost no emotions, except that it refers the viewer to the distant and terrible past and thus attracts attention. This building also has a psychologically depressing atmosphere, to which, first of all, the head of the Lutz family is subjected. The painstaking analysis of his changing mental state is shown in the film just disgustingly, which completely kills all the tension in this work.

The characters in the film, for the most part, are unattractive and evoke a kind of disgust rather than sympathy. For example, a silly priest who, it is not clear why he appeared at the house of the Lutzes and tried to hold some ridiculous rite of exorcism, later his pupil – a young pastor – joined him, this fact makes the movie a pathetic imitation of “Exorcism”. Other characters are even more pathetic and completely unnecessary in the film, and their images are not disclosed in any way. This flaw strongly prevents the viewer from focusing on the main characters in ‘The Amityville Horror’, which makes this work even more vague and weak.

The picture is not rich in horror scenes, it is worth mentioning only the scene with the falling window and the red eyes in the dark. The viewer will not see ghosts as such here either, which may lead to some misunderstanding of the communication between Katty Lutz’s daughter and a certain girl, Jody, who died in this very house, as information about Jody is extremely scarce during the viewing.

The plot of the film does not focus at all on the individual experiences of the film’s main characters, but mainly focuses on the completely left-wing characters. The lack of strong psychological suspense is largely responsible for my negative attitude towards this picture, which is not even close to its strong remake.

The musical accompaniment of the film is praiseworthy, not for nothing it was nominated for awards. It is a pity it does not suit the film’s lethargic and un-atmospheric action. The finale does not reflect the idea of the film at all and completely fails, making the whole work a laughing stock.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (89.7 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles
English SDH.