SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Rachel Nichols in The Amityville Horror (2005)

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!

Gleeful hypocrisy

While I admire Dianna Agron's diplomacy in trying to diffuse the storm in a teacup over her GQ photoshoot with two of her 'Glee' co-starts, was there any need for The Parents' Television Council to be quite so hyperbolic? According to them, the photoshoot "borders on paedophilia". For God's sake, get a grip - she's 24!

And also, isn't there a degree of hypocrisy at work here? Are these self-appointed moralists seriously trying to suggest that it's fine to tune in week after week to see her in a cheerleader's outfit ...

... but this is beyond the pail?

I mean, if she was topless and sprawled out on the floor of the gym with nothing but a stragetically placed pom-pom between Middle America and her holiest of holies, yeah I can see how that would be controversial.

But you'd have to be Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi to get that upset over a few inches of midriff and a shapely pair of legs!

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #6: Slither

Welcome to Wheelsy. Let’s take a walk down Main Street, past R.J. MacReady’s funeral parlour and Max Renn’s video store. We could drop by Henenlotter’s bar for a drink, or grab a bite at Meg Penny’s diner.

It’s in-jokes like these, all unobtrusively slotted into the background, that are the cleverest thing about ‘Slithers’. The plot – equally derived from a thousand other movies – less so. A comet falls in the woods behind the town. Successful local businessman (and boorish lout) Grant Grant (Michael Rooker), hitting the bar after his trophy wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks) spurns his advances, picks up an old flame and they head home canoodling through the woods. Grant stumbles upon an alien pod which cracks open and infects him. He becomes withdrawn, starts doing something secretive in the basement and develops a craving for meat. He buys it to start with, in large amounts, then progresses to snacking on neighbourhood dogs and even coyotes.

Starla becomes suspicious, and when Grant goes beserk and attacks her she turns to laconic town sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillian) for help. Bill’s been carrying a torch for Starla for a while.

Does all of this sound familiar? ‘Slithers’ does nothing new – and deliberately so. It draws on audience familiarity with just about every small town horror movie trope in the book. Its loathsome slug-like monsters are like the creatures in ‘Tremors’ only small; they enter the bodies of their prey through the mouth a la ‘Night of the Creeps’; one of them glides through a bathtub like Freddy Krueger’s glove.

Unfortunately, ‘Slithers’ is very hit-and-miss in terms of how well it uses its borrowings. When the town is under siege by the slugs and the good folk of Wheelsy are turning into lumbering zombies – and when, as a result, Bill emerges as the hero of the day, the hugely likeable Fillion taking centre stage – ‘Slither’ fires on all cylinders. The pace is fast, the set-pieces are well executed and the humour quotient is acceptable.

It’s the first third that’s never quite worked for me. Focusing almost solely on Grant, it’s a humourless and surprisingly nasty-minded stretch of film, particularly the scene where Grant forcibly infects his old flame – it’s staged very much like a rape. Perhaps because of Rooker’s intense physicality, Grant comes across as genuinely threatening, monstrous even before his transformation is complete. The shift in tone when Grant goes to ground and Bill and his hastily convened posse try to track him down – writer/director James Gunn cutting loose with the comedy – is significantly less than seamless. In fact, the film lurches and it takes a while to re-establish a tone.

‘Slither’ follows in the footsteps of the likes of ‘Tremors’, ‘Arachnophobia’ and ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ – all of which manage to have their cake and eat it, being affable and entertaining films which nonetheless deliver suspenseful scenes and enough of an ick factor to satisfy the horror fan – but never quite lives up to them. The posters trumpeted it as “the best horror comedy since ‘Shaun of the Dead’.” It’s a decent 90-minute timewaster with enough belly-laughs to make it worth your while, but it’s definitely not in the ‘Shaun of the Dead’ league.

It does, however, end with a C&W ballad over the end credits called ‘Baby I Love You, Just Leave Me the Fuck Alone’. Which is nice.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #5: Pieces

Boston, 1942. A young boy crouches on the floor of his room, completing a jigsaw. The door opens behind him. His mom enters, gazes lovingly at him. She moves forward, craning her head to look at the puzzle he’s doing. This is where the pastoral scene goes south. Junior’s putting together a jigsaw that shows a naked woman. Mom goes off on one, slapping junior around and shrieking that he’s just like his father. She bawls him out of the room, telling him to get a plastic bag to put this filth in, then tears through his drawers, ranting as she pulls out a stash of girlie mags. Junior reappears. It seems he’s mistaken “plastic bag” for “axe”. He buries said implement in mom’s head. Cut to: concerned neighbour at the door. Cut to: junior hacking away with a saw, blood spattered all over him. Cut to: concerned neighbour and two police officers bursting in. Junior does an Oscar-worthy job of playing the scared kid. Result: junior gets packed off to stay with an aunt while mom’s disembodied head stares lifelessly across the blood-drenched room.

Yeah, ‘Pieces’ is subtle.

So subtle that the title credit looks like this:

Anyway, once the tactful and understated opening credits are out of the way, the movie jumps forward forty years and we’re on the campus of a perennially sunny American university populated by sweater girls, geeky guys and bristly teachers. Oh yeah, and a masked dude with a chainsaw whose chief means of getting his jollies is the evisceration of nubile girls.

Yes indeedy, folks, we’re in exploitation territory.

It’s tempting to imagine ‘Pieces’ made in the 70s, round about the time of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ – an edgy, ballsy, terrifying slab of exploitation. The kind of film that gives exploitation a good name. But no. It’s the 80s, so everyone’s sporting a perm, the fashions are an insult to the eyes and edgy, ballsy filmmaking has been sacrificed to the twin gods of power ballads and mullets. Yay! Let’s hear it for the 80s!

While never stymied by inclusion on the DPP’s “video nasties” list, ‘Pieces’ shares much with the majority of titles that were. Namely, an unapologetic desire to shock terminally undermined by bargain basement production values and a stultifying lack of talent both behind and in front of the camera.

Granted, the opening scene of pre-pubescent-boy-on-mother violence is censor-baiting in the extreme but it’s essentially nothing new. Cinema has always mined a rich seam of disturbed Oedipal types, from ‘Psycho’ to ‘Deep Red’. Indeed, in its juxtapositions, musical cues and fetishistic close-ups of leather-gloved hands pawing over childhood keepsakes, ‘Pieces’ almost purposefully patterns itself on Argento’s classic.

But whereas ‘Deep Red’ is, uh, good, ‘Pieces’ isn’t. ‘Pieces’ is woefully, wantonly, wonderfully inept. ‘Pieces’ is one of those bona fide so-bad-it’s-good horror movies. Everything about it – from the attempt to graft giallo stylings onto a straightforward stalk ‘n’ slash template, to a monumentally hypocritical aesthetic which disallows a character utter an oath stronger than “wretched” but has no moral objection to a teenage girl getting beheaded by a chainsaw – is misjudged to such a degree that scene after scene squanders its very real potential for offensiveness and provocation and emerges instead as hysterically funny.

I particularly love the way the killer is so often shown stalking someone. We see him in profile, from behind, in shadow, in silhouette or framed in a doorway or window, and it’s the same each time: androgynous figure, black hat, scarf concealing face, black trenchcoat, back leather gloves. The moment he catches up with his victim du jour, the guy pulls a fucking chainsaw out of nowhere and goes apeshit. Remember that bit in ‘You Only Live Twice’ where Bond hikes up a volcano wearing just a pair of swimming trunks, then when he reaches the top he’s inexplicably kitted out with a frogman’s outfit and a utility belt? This is kind of the same thing. But with a fucking chainsaw. (There’s even a scene where the killer enters an elevator with a victim-in-waiting, the chainsaw hidden behind his back. In a fucking elevator! I mean, come on – the blade on this thing is about three feet long!!!)

Illogicality reigns supreme. The detective in charge of the case assigns a famous tennis player to go undercover at the school and appoints some hormonally-charged kid as her back-up. ’Coz, like, that’s how police investigations work, right? I mean, I can’t understand why I’ve never encountered this scenario in an Ian Rankin novel.

But why ask for logic in a film that features a “kung fu professor”, a snooping female journalist patterned right down to the hairstyle on Daria Nicolodi in ‘Deep Red’ but who fulfils not one iota of the same narrative function, a tennis scene that tries to get away with the same visual joke as Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ and plays out to an oompah band soundtrack, and which tries to pin 80 minutes’ worth of red herrings on its teenage or twenty-something cast when the killer has already been established as a man in his late forties, the personages who fit the bill numbering only three, one of whom is so blatantly a herring of a distinctly ochre pigmentation?

Man, I can’t believe I’ve already expended more words on ‘Pieces’ than I did on ‘Martyrs’, ‘Outpost’ or ‘Ginger Snaps’. Really! 1,000 words on a film that can best be described as crass. But maybe that’s the appeal of films like ‘Pieces’; maybe that’s the fun of writing about them. Gory, bloody, vicious and completely unreconstructed they may be, but they’re also – as a rule – so incompetent in concept and execution that it’s hard to see how even the most dim-witted and easily influenced viewer could be corrupted by them. The harder they strive for terror, the more laughable they become.

‘Pieces’ was never meant as such, but it’s a fucking great comedy.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: Ginger Snaps

Sisters Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins) are two normal teenage girls living in a Canadian suburb when –

Nah, scratch that. Ginger and Brigitte are maladjusted 16 and 15 year old sisters whose idea of an art project at school is to present a sequence of photographs depicting themselves as suicide victims. They’re permanently disaffected and uncommunicative. They make goths look joyous and emos seem effervescent.

Kind of understandable really. They live in a dull, washed-out suburbia and have the embarrassment of the world’s perkiest mom (Mimi Rogers) who wears horrible sweaters, incessantly enquires as to whether they’ve had their period yet and sports pumpkin earrings at Halloween.

School’s not much better than home, populated as it is by asshole jocks like Jason (Jesse Moss) and bitch teen princess Trina (Danielle Hampton). It sucks, too, that going out at night is strictly verboten given the spate of vicious attacks on neighbourhood dogs. When an eviscerated canine turns up on the hockey field, Trina vengefully trips Brigitte so she falls face-first into the decomposing mess. (The catalyst for this act is Brigitte referring to Trina as a “cum bucket”.)

Planning retribution, Ginger and Brigitte sneak out at night with the intent of kidnapping Trina’s dog and leaving some of the fake blood and viscera from their “suicide” photographs outside its kennel. They never get there. Ginger, who has finally started her period, is attacked by a werewolf. Brigitte tries to fend the beast off and it’s only dispatched when passing drug pusher Sam (Kris Lemche) runs over it with his van.

In your average werewolf movie, this would be the point at which Ginger develops a tendency to sprout hair (which she does), howl at the moon (which she doesn’t) and randomly devour people (the movie has “snaps” in the title; take a guess). Director John Fawcett, working from a gem of a script by Karen Walton, does a hell of a lot more with the material. Allaying Ginger’s late menstruation with a different and more feral change – the tagline “they don’t call it the curse for nothing” sums up the concept pithily – the film becomes a metaphor for sexual awakening, female empowerment and the dangers of heightened self-awareness.

In short order, Ginger transforms from dowdy to foxy to downright fucking scary but still kinda sexy with it …

… and promptly starts smoking weed, arguing with Brigitte, pissing her mother off even more than usual, and hanging out with Jason the asshole jock. Initially Jason can’t believe his luck, particularly when Ginger comes on all hot and heavy during a back-seat make out. He soon gets scared, though. It’s bad enough when she takes the lead and starts treating him like a girl. Worse is Ginger’s extreme version of a love bite. The final straw is when Jason pisses blood. At this point, he rounds on Brigitte, wanting to know what the deal is with her sister.

Brigitte, still idolizing her big sis despite all the nasty shit that’s going down (this sentence perhaps explains why Sight and Sound are still reluctant to engage my services), has already put it together and, in league with Sam, is working towards a cure. However, thanks to Jason’s impeccable sense of bad timing and Mrs Fitzgerald interfering for all the right reasons at totally the wrong moment, Brigitte and Sam find themselves playing beat-the-clock as Ginger’s transformation reaches completion and they only have one shot at curing her.

‘Ginger Snaps’ is not only the best werewolf opus since ‘An American Werewolf in London’, it’s also an inspired black comedy, a razor-sharp and black-heartedly accurate high school movie, and a celebration of individuality, feminism and sisterhood. They say that blood is thicker than water. For Ginger and Brigitte, the question is whether blood is thicker than blood-lust.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: Outpost

Yay! After the disappointment of ‘Dead Snow’, Steve Barker’s ‘Outpost’ is a Nazi zombie movie which actually does something with the concept of Nazi zombies. It keeps the zombies more or less offscreen for a good two-thirds of the movie, throws in a science vs. the supernatural subtext that explains the manifestations, and delivers the gore when it needs to but never resorts to blood and guts for their own sake. It’s easily the best group-of-soldiers-meet-something-evil movie this side of Neil Marshall’s ‘Dog Soldiers’. Unlike ‘Dog Soldiers’, though, there’s barely a trace of humour in ‘Outpost’. Barker plays it straight and delivers a nice line in slow-burn tension.

The film opens in an unnamed Eastern European location. The territory is politically unstable with control “switching between government and insurgents on a weekly basis”. The countryside is rumoured to be rife with bandits, patrols and people who, as a general rule, would shoot you rather than look at you. It’s here that the mysterious Hunt (Julian Wadham), who represents a group he refers to only as “the financiers”, engages hard-bitten mercenary DC (Ray Stevenson) and his right-hand-man Prior (Richard Brake) to put together a team and guarantee his safe passage to a remote site.

They arrive at a World War II bunker and a firefight with unseen assailants immediately results in one of their number injured and the rest of them pinned down. Inside the bunker, they discover Nazi paraphernalia, a strange-looking machine that Hunt takes an obsessive interest in, and a room full of corpses … No, wait; one of them’s still breathing.

Barker gets his team assembled and into the field within ten minutes. They’re at the bunker within another ten. From hereon in, and with the exception of a couple of engagements with their unseen foe above ground, he relegates most of the action to the shadowy corridors and dusty rooms of the bunker. The first indications of supernatural goings-on are effective for not being over-egged. Barker reveals the full implications of the Nazi zombies’ capabilities gradually, establishing the science subplot in tandem.

Tensions exacerbate amongst the mercenaries. A revelation courtesy of a Nazi propaganda film reel scored to Wagner* puts things in context. We’re nearly an hour into an 86 minute film before the first of the group discovers how little the Geneva Convention matters to undead National Socialists. By this point, Barker’s ramped up the tension and created an atmosphere you could cut with a knife.

‘Outpost’ has a few flaws – the dialogue is often blandly utilitarian and heavy on testosterone; apart from Hunt, DC and Prior, the characters are cardboard cut-outs; the ending seems slightly rushed; and the alternative ending on the DVD’s special features is conceptually more interesting than the rather obvious coda the filmmakers went for in the theatrical cut – but even if ‘Outpost’, in the final analysis, is a good film rather than a great one, it’s still that rarest of beasts: a pretty damn good Nazi zombie film.

*One of two perfectly chosen classical pieces on the soundtrack. The other is the best use of Beethoven’s Ninth since ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Prior’s “I fuckin’ love culture” line is priceless).