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Platinum Dunes, a production company co-founded by Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Rock), released several remakes of classic horror movies in the early ’00s. One of them, arguably their best effort, was this remake of the 1979 film The Amityville Horror. The story is largely the same, centered around a family of five that moves into a haunted house that slowly possesses the patriarch (Ryan Reynolds) in an effort to make him murder his family and himself. While the daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz) cavorts with a ghost girl no one else can see and the mother (Melissa George) tries to enlist a priest (Philip Baker Hall) to cleanse the house, Reynolds slowly loses his grip on reality and eventually picks up an axe with the intent to fulfill the house’s deadly desires.
I rarely say this, but this is a remake that outshines the original. It’s shorter, leaner, and more climactic than the 1979 film, and Ryan Reynolds is far more compelling as the possessed father figure than James Brolin was in the original film. While the remake is better, it’s also far from great. Director Andrew Douglas (primarily a music video director) styles every shot of this movie as though it were a climactic horror event, which robs the film of suspense since everything is amped up from the start. There are too many gratuitous jump scares and horror ‘tropes’ thrown into the movie. The revelation that the house was built on an insane asylum is highly unnecessary, and the ghost girl (Isabel Conner) appears in the flesh too many times. The final shot involving this character ends the movie on a sour, stupid note.
It’s Ryan Reynolds who makes this movie watchable. His slow descent into madness is interesting to watch, even if some of the dialogue is a bit obvious and pointed. I also appreciate that the wife and kids don’t just run away from him after he’s possessed — they try to save him, too. Young Chloe Grace Moretz, in her film debut, shows the promise she would fulfill in later films like Kick-Ass and Let Me In. Philip Baker Hall is sadly underutilized, but his priest character doesn’t really need any more screen time than he has. Rachel Nichols is memorable as the sexy babysitter who scares the kids by telling them the story of the house’s legacy.
With Jesse James and Jimmy Bennett.