The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Amityville Horror (1979)

For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.

And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.

This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.

The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.

The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.

I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.

To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.

I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.

But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.

One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.

I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.

Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)

The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Amityville Horror

Haunted House stories have to be some of the oldest examples of scary tales of horror. What’s scarier than the fear that resides right in your own home? Where can you find safety if not your own house? Where do we find much of our own horror but our own homes late at night with the creepy shadows and wind-blown creaky noises?

The Amityville Horror (1979) does a nice job of ratcheting up the spooks for about the first half but falters off towards the end.

Based on the book of the same name, which is supposedly based on true events, the story focuses on the Lutz family who just moved into a lovely old home that takes on some devious supernatural qualities. You see as the story begins we see that the family living in the home before the Lutz family were all brutally murdered in their sleep by one of their own. Even knowing this, the Lutz family buy the house for a bargain and move in because “houses don’t have memories.”

Houses it seems, not only have memories but have rotten dispositions too.

Strange things start to happen pretty immediately when the Lutz’s move in. The boathouse lights turn on and doors open in the middle of the night, the toilets get clogged with blood-looking ooze, and the priest who comes to bless the house (Rod Steiger) gets trapped in a room with a million flies and is told by a creepy voice to get out.

The film moves slowly towards its frights. This isn’t a film with a real live knife-wielding boogeyman ready to jump out and scare the family (and audience) at a moment’s notice. No, this film builds its horror with slow tension. Creepy things happen amongst the more mundane events of the family’s life. Between the scares we see the family unpacking boxes, attending weddings, taking boat rides, and chopping wood. Lots and lots of wood chopping.

Although amongst all of this in-between action, we hardly get to know the family at all. It is late in the film that it is revealed what George Lutz (a very hairy James Brolin) does. There is lots of talk about him needing to go back to work and all of these odd shots of the business van that only reveal that George owns his own business but strangely cut off the occupation. Eventually, it is revealed that he is a surveyor. And that’s how the whole movie is. We see a lot of the family doing things, but get no connection as to who they are as people.

Ultimately the slow build of tension fizzles out before it can really burst. This is the problem with making a haunted house picture. If there isn’t a ghost or phantom coming out of the walls, there is only so much horror a house itself can bring. Droves of flies, windows opening on their own, and chairs moving by themselves can build some tension, but without something bigger causing it all that’s left is a disappointment. In the end, all the filmmakers can muster is lots of heavy thunder and rain followed by a stairwell collapsing into a basement of blood. It’s just a house after all and that can be run away from.

Apparently, they followed the book pretty closely, and I’m not one to often ask for the creature behind the horror, but here it seems like they should have given us a little more. I can’t imagine the devil appearing for a final attack would have made the picture a great one, but it could have at least given a more adventurous ending.

The Harder They Fall (1956)

the harder they fall

I friggin’ love Humphrey Bogart. In fact, he tops my Top 10 list of greatest actors. He played cold-blooded villains, cynical but good-hearted tough guys, down-on-his-luck schmucks, and romantic leads with the same grace and passion. It doesn’t hurt that he’s been in some of the greatest movies ever made. With a resume that includes Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, the Treasure of the Sierre Madre, and the African Queen it’s no wonder Bogart comes out as the actor starring in the most films on the AFI top 100 films list.

In fact, until now, I’ve loved all of the films I’ve ever seen starring Humphrey Bogart. I do my very best to catch any film in which he had a role. Being that he acted in some 74 movies during his career, I’ve still got a bit to go.

It was with great anticipation that I watch any Bogart film. You just can’t go wrong with a Bogie movie, I often say. Recently, I grabbed a worn-out VHS copy of his last film, The Harder They Fall. It pains me to say, but I can no longer claim that I’ve never seen a Humphrey Bogart picture that was less than wonderful.

It’s not that The Harder They Fall is a bad film. In fact, there were some rather good moments. It’s just that when compared to the other Bogart films I have seen this one falls well below the bar.

What pains me, even more, is that some of its failures lies in the hands of Bogart himself. Yet before we take the man off of his pedestal, I must remind the reader that at this point in his life, he was dying of cancer. It had not been diagnosed yet, but there is little doubt that Bogart’s insides were being eaten alive during filming. Legend has it that a sound-alike dubbed his lines during post-production.

His illness shows through the performance. He looks tired, and haggard throughout.

But you say “The character is tired and haggard, so shouldn’t the actor act that way?”

“Yes,” of course, I’ll answer, “but Bogart practically made a career of tired, haggard characters yet in films like Casablanca or Treasure of the Sierra Madre he embodied the characters and made them look tired.” Here, you see an actor who is a master craftsman performing at a much lower level than we’ve come to expect.

But, look, I spit on no man’s grave. Remember a fine actor’s better performances; let a dead man have his dignity.

There is a film in there, besides a Bogart performance. The plot concerns a down-and-out sportswriter, Eddie Willis (Bogart) hired as publicity man for an up-and-coming boxer (Mike Lane) who can’t actually box. The boxer, Toro Moreno, is a giant of a man who looks menacing but punches like a girl (and not a girl like Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby). You see Toro is mob-connected boxing promoter Nick Benko’s (Rod Steiger) fighter. Benko plans to buy every fight Toro boxes all the way up to a championship bout in which, betting on the other fighter, Benko will make a bundle.
The story is actually a good one, and with a little tweaking it could have been a great film. But the writing never really sparkles, and the direction never rises above the material.

Steiger’s performance is the films saving grace. He manages to come off completely ruthless, and immoral while still making the audience love the character. He out acts Bogart in every scene, and even with a tired, sick Bogart that is still quite an accomplishment.

Bogart may look tired on the screen, but his presence is still a formidable one. His lines don’t shine like they might in The Big Sleep, and his character isn’t quite as iconic as Rick in Casablanca, but he still manages to outperform most of the actors who’ve put their faces on a theatre screen.

I’ll take an average Bogart performance over Tom Cruise’s best roles any day.