Melissa George

Many happy returns to Melissa George - arguably the best horror heroine in contemporary cinema - who is 35 today.

Women in horror: six great horror heroines

Celebrating Day of the Woman’s “Women in Horror Month” with half a dozen feisty final girls, resilient heroines and one sexy sheriff who looks good packing a shotgun.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie in ‘Halloween’

Melissa George as Jess in ‘Triangle’

Signourey Weaver as Ripley in ‘Alien’

Jessica Harper as Suzy in ‘Suspiria’

Adrienne Barbeau as Stevie in ‘The Fog’

Kari Wuhrer as Sheriff Parker in ‘Eight Legged Freaks’

(Don’t forget to visit Day of the Woman for a month-long celebration of women in horror.)

13 FOR HALLOWEEN # 7: Two visits to Amityville

For my friend Lucy Beckett, with thanks

In the early hours of 13 November 1974, Ronald DeFeo – a 23-year old with a history of drug abuse and personality disorder – shot his parents and his four siblings at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, Long Island. After initially telling the investigating officers a highly suspect story that his family had been wiped out by a mob hitman, he confessed to the murders saying that he’d heard voices telling him to kill. Thirteen months later, following a five-week trial, DeFeo was given six consecutive sentences of 25 years to life. Today, he remains in the Green Haven Correctional Facility, Beekman, New York.

On 23 December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue, along with Kathy’s three children from her previous marriage. By January 1976, they’d left the place. In September 1977, Jay Anson’s purportedly non-fiction account of their brief tenure, ‘The Amityville Horror’, hit the bookshelves and became a runaway success. Stuart Rosenberg’s 1979 film adaptation replicated that success at the box office. Over the next two decades, a further seven ‘Amityville’ films were released – the law of diminishing returns flapping like a plague-ridden vulture around each subsequent title – until the franchise reached its crass, intellectually redundant and viscerally retarded nadir with ‘Amityville Dollhouse’ in 1996.

In 2005, Rosenberg’s original got the remake treatment from Platinum Dunes. Bearing in mind that Platinum Dunes (CEO, Michael “666” Bay) is less a film production company that a serial rapist lurking down the midnight streets of ’70s cinema to drag one classic after another screaming into some forgotten back alley and then toss them aside, broken and ravaged, as soon as the deed is done, Andrew Douglas’s new version of ‘The Amityville Horror’ was something I approached cautiously.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read Jay Anson’s book. A friend of mine describes it as “a real page-turner and very entertaining, but total bollocks”, citing masses of inconsistencies throughout the text, even extending to ambiguity over the actual date the Lutzes moved in. Trawling the internet for background information having watched Rosenberg and Douglas’s films back-to-back, there seems to be a lot of hyberole-ridden Amityville speculation out there but very little in the way of academic, level-headed, collaboratively researched material.

At least half a dozen other books have been published since Anson’s bestseller, most of which seem to be band-wagon jumping pulp titles. Many reviews of the Anson book refer to it as a novel rather than a factual work. Lawsuits and controversies dogged its publication. Anson didn’t work with the Lutzes in writing the book, but drew on tape-recordings of their recollections. It has been suggested that Anson reordered some of the incidents from the Lutzes’ account as well as inventing scenes wholesale. It’s also been alleged that Anson’s book represents an exaggeration and in some places a contradiction of the original account the Lutzes gave the press soon after leaving 112 Ocean Avenue, particularly with regard to the amount of time they spent in the house. They first claimed that malevolent forces drove them out within 10 days. In the book – and both Rosenberg and Douglas’s movies – it’s stated that they left after 28 days. All of these works site that the Lutzes fled the house without returning for their personal possessions. Actually, their possessions were collected by a moving firm shortly afterwards. The employee who collected them reported no paranormal activity during the time he was inside the house. Nor have any of the subsequent owners reported run-ins with pissed off ghosts.

I’ll do the book courtesy of reading it before I publicly disparage it on this site, but between the fact that it appeared so quickly after the Lutzes’ departure and that the book and movie deal seem to have been brokered on the Lutzes’ behalf by William Weber (the defence lawyer at Ronald DeFeo’s trial!), it’s hard not to be of the opinion that ‘The Amityville Horror’ was conceived as a highly saleable product (particularly with the huge success of ‘The Exorcist’ in 1973 and ‘The Omen’ in 1976) rather than a seriously investigative account of George and Kathy Lutz’s experiences.

Stuart Rosenberg’s heavy-handed adaptation opened in 1979 with James Brolin at George and Margot Kidder as Kathy. Although Rosenberg has some cracking films on his CV – ‘Cool Hand Luke’, ‘The Drowning Pool’, ‘The Pope of Greenwich Village’ – ‘The Amityville Horror’ has a tang of hack work about it. Apart from a barnstorming turn by Brolin, the acting is generally shoddy. Kidder is terrible while Rod Steiger, as a priest driven out of the house after attempting to bless it, overacts appallingly. Two scenes in particular – his argument with a senior member of the Catholic church, and his torment by a supernatural force that follows him into his own church (“Oh Lord, give them strrrreeenggggthhhh of miiiiiind and boddddyyyyy!”) – go beyond histrionics and knock on the door of parody.

Sandor Stern’s script is uneven, doggedly taking the Lutzes’ point of view for the first half then drifting off to follow first Steiger’s priest (the real Catholic priest whom Kathy Lutz consulted has stated for the record that he only discussed the Lutzes’ concerns about the house over the phone) then an entirely fictitious police detective who all but waves at the camera and says “Hi everybody, I’m here to remind you of Lieutenant Kinderman in ‘The Exorcist’, please tell all your friends to come see this movie” before fucking right off having fulfilled no narrative or expositional purpose whatsoever.

The effects veer between the simple but effective – the steady movement of an unoccupied rocking chair; a pair of disembodied red eyes outside a window – and hilariously bad. The moment when George sees his daughter’s imaginary friend Jodie manifest as a demon pig is so funny I’m surprised no-one developed the character for a spin-off movie: ‘The Ham-eaterie-ville Horror’.

By the end, Rosenberg has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into the mix: walls seeping what’s either blood or pus (or maybe a demonic admixture); an inverted crucifix; a plague of flies; floorboards cracking open in full-on gateway-to-hell stylee; the family pooch going all Cujo; a plaster ornament inexplicably administering bite marks; George hallucinating his wife as a wrinkly old woman; closet doors with no lock somehow locking on a traumatized babysitter.

Ah, yes. The babysitter. Here we have an excellent segue from ‘The Amityville Horror’ of 1979 with its nerdy babysitter wearing the kind of braces that look like they were designed by a committee which included Pinhead, Joseph Mengele and H.R. Giger …

… and ‘The Amityville Horror’ of 2005 where the babysitter’s played by Rachel Nichols and, oh my sweet lord, why did I never have a babysitter who looked like this?

Now, notwithstanding that we’ve racked up an immediate point to the remake in terms of the braces vs. cleavage decision, the babysitter/closet scene is so much more effective in Douglas’s hands. Whereas the original gives us a shrieky girl batting her hands against the closet door until they’re bloody followed by a redoubling of the efforts in the screaming department once the lights go out, the remake pointedly shows us what she’s screaming about. It may not be particularly original (Douglas has definitely got his J-horror funk on) or unexpected, but it works.

The wood chopping scene works a whole lot better in the remake, too. Whereas Brolin in the original swings the axe away moodily until he’s stacked up about five years’ worth of firewood, George (here played by Ryan Reynolds in a perfectly acceptable performance) decides to punish Kathy (Melissa George)’s oldest son for a perceived misdemeanour by forcing him to hold each chunk of wood on the chopping block while he brings the axe down. The threat is real and immediate, the scene tense and not overplayed.

Melissa George’s typically excellent turn is perhaps the highest example of trading up in any remake ever made. The kids are generally better, too, most notably Chloe Grace Moretz in her debut role. Subject of which, I absolutely love this moment. It replaces Jodie the porcine demon with Jodie the creepy J-horror style dead girl. I look at this …

… and I’m not thinking Eeeeeewwww, scary dead ghost girl. Uh-uh. I’m thinking Hey, scary dead ghost, that’s the future Hit Girl you’re fucking with. An exorcist is going to be a walk in the park compared to pissing this one off.

Philip Baker Hall, again improving on the original performance, plays the luckless priest whose only contribution to the film is to flee the house after the most rubbish attempt at exorcism in the history of the genre. And this, I think, is key to appreciating the remake over the original: Rosenberg’s take on the material is plodding serious and not particularly well executed. Douglas, although paying lip service to the “based on a true story” tag, seems to acknowledge from the off that the book is mostly likely a load of bunkum and gets on with treating the scant running time (87 minutes, the end credits comprising almost ten of them) as a rollercoaster ride through the expected Amityville tropes as well as throwing in a couple of excellent sequences of his own, both involving young Chelsea (Morentz) lured into dangerous situations – a near drowning in the boathouse and a vertiginous bit of business up on the roof – by her spectral friend.

Credit where it’s due, though, the original makes better use of the immediately recognisable look of the house, effortlessly portraying those creepy quarter-windows as eyes behind which something evil lurks. Moreover, Brolin’s performance tops Reynolds’ … although Reynolds is served by a script that gives George Lutz a little more credit. In the original he goes wacko pretty much from the start and doesn’t come through for his family until the very last scene. The remake shows George struggling throughout against the darker impulses inexplicably manifesting in him; there’s never any doubt that he’s basically a decent family man trying to fight what’s happening to him. In virtually all other aspects though – and most crucially, in not feeling any need to treat Anson’s book as sacrosanct and instead just cutting loose and having some dark and cynical fun with the material – the remake wins out.

Hey, I’m favouring a Platinum Dunes production over the original. Now that’s scary!

30 Days of Night

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall: 63 of 100

On paper, David Slade’s Alaska-set vampire opus has the elements of golden age John Carpenter: a small community beset by supernatural forces (a la ‘The Fog’); a wintery, isolated setting (a la ‘The Thing’); a small group of protagonists pinned down and outnumbered (a la ‘Assault on Precinct 13’). When ’30 Days of Night’ was screened on Film Four last night, I was rubbing my hands in glee at the prospect of an old-school horror movie with the suspense factor ramped up to the max.

And to be fair, the first half hour works well. Slade demonstrates an admirable economy in setting up the locale and introducing his characters: we’ve got Sheriff Eben Olesen (Josh Hartnett), his estranged wife Stella (the excellent Melissa George), his brother Jake (Mark Rendall), truculent loner Beau Brower (Mark Boone Jnr) and a handful of other townsfolk. A stranger shows up, massacres the huskies, sabotages the helicopter, fucks up phone and internet connectivity and essentially cuts the town off from the outset world.

All this on the last day of sunlight, when the residents are battening down the hatches for 30 days of – … well, the clue’s in the title. Eben arrests the stranger, but it turns out he’s only the vanguard. A bunch of vampires, lead by the ruthless Marlow (Danny Huston), hit town as soon as the darkness descends. Most of the populace are massacred (and drained of the old plasma) in short order, leaving a – yup! – small group of mismatched survivors under the increasingly strained leadership of Eben to hole up and try to stay alive.

The remainder of the film jumps from day seven to day eighteen to day twenty-seven. Some of the incident in these sequences seems to span two or three days. By my reckoning (although I must confess I gave the film less and less of my attention the longer it limped on), the vampires get their fill of virtually all the townspeople on the first couple of nights, then there are gaps of a week or so before they pick off one or two of the survivors. Which beggars the question: why stick around so long when the pickings are so slim? Moreoever – SPOILER ALERT – when the vampires decide to burn the place to the ground, both to drive out the remaining survivors and to cover their tracks, they do so on the last day of full dark. Why not do so earlier? Surely they’ve got a fair bit of travelling to do before the sun comes up. They did their main feeding the first two nights, why not make a sustained push to drive out the survivors, finish them off, burn the town and get the fuck out of Do— … er, Alaska by the end of the first week? Who knows, maybe there’s another small town cloaked in darkness for a month and they could stop off for desserts before heading back to wherever they came from? (The vampires speak something that sounds like a combination of Serbian, Vulcan and elvish, their horribly portentous dialogue rendered in subtitles.) END SPOILER.

‘30 Days of Night’ has a higher ratio of characters doing stupid fucking things than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. If the vampires don’t seem like the sharpest tools in the box, well they’re practically MENSA material compared to the people. The day seven incident where some old timer decides he wants to go for a walk – despite the fact that there’s a blizzard outside as well as a bunch of hungry fucking vampires – necessitating his son to race out into the street after him yelling “Daaaaaaaaaad!” at the top of his voice until the neck-biters descend on him, had me face-palming in disbelief. Later, Eben and his merry band up sticks from the attic they’ve holed up in and make a dash for the general store. You know, a place that’s full of food, drink, provisions, supplies. Cut to day eighteen. Apparently, there’s been no vampire activity for several days. Judging from how well stocked the shelves are, our heroes still seem to have plenty of victuals on hand. They’re warm, they’re safe, they’ve got twelve days left till the sun comes up and the bloodsuckers vamoose. So what does Eben decide? “We can’t stay here. We have to move.” No word of explanation, no murmur of protest. Seriously, not one of these goobers raises a hand and says, “Er, excuse me, pretty boy sheriff dude. One question: fucking why?” No, they just get behind numbnuts with the badge and gun and blithely risk life and limb as they make a pointless dash to another location.

I could go on. I could talk about the massive discrepancy in how long it takes a bitten human to turn. (It seems to be anywhere between seconds and entire freakin’ days.) I could bemoan the relentless seriousness of it all and the lack of emotional engagement with most of the characters (only Stella comes across as remotely empathetic and that’s mainly due to Melissa George’s performance). I could point out the misogyny: vampires can apparently feed off a male victim quickly and efficiently; to a man who’s just tried to kill them, they can administer the coup de grace swiftly; but when they’ve got a woman at their mercy, they slap her around for a while before breaking out the fangs. What the fuck, nosferatu dudes, isn’t it enough just to kill your victims?

I could go on, but I’ve already demolished my remit of sticking to short 500 word posts during this bank holiday weekend splurge of reviewing. Let’s leave it at this: ’30 Days of Night’ had the potential to be great; unfortunately, it just grates.