Tag Archives: imaginary friends

The Amityville Horror (2005)

MV5BMzc1Njc2NDc3NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODYyNzI3._V1__SX1217_SY911_There should be more horror movies showing, because it makes it a lot easier to hit the theater when there’s not really anything that you particularly want to see. Sure, it may not be great, but at least you can be sure of good, clean, passable fun. And sometimes, it is great.

In the case of the Amityville Horror remake, I was solidly in the former experience. Which was disappointing, but only because it started out with such promise. The cast was trimmed down and the plot tightened up over the original, keeping the focus on the house and the family, where it needed to be[1]. Both the camerawork and the script kept the three-story house and multi-acre lot feeling claustrophobic, all the better to let all manner of Indian ghosts, angry woodsmen, and imaginary friends leap into frame at any moment. Which, you see, results in terror.

The problem was a little too much reveal. So many visible scary images so early on left the director without any room to escalate gracefully, and as a result, the final act was overwrought at its best, laughably silly at its worst. I think what makes me the saddest is how easy that would have been to avoid, and make the story feel as believable at the end as it was at the beginning.

[1] Oh, right, the plot in 60 seconds, if you don’t know it: The Lutz family moves into this house a year after the previous family were all murdered in their sleep by the eldest son, who claimed that voices told him to. Lots of strange badnesses occur, and they are no longer living there a mere 28 days later. Based on a true story. (Y’know, maybe.)

Hide and Seek

The thing is, this was a good movie. Several inevitable games of Hide and Seek, of course, but even those managed (for the most part) to be tense and creepy, rather than like the lame repetitive device they could have been.

Anyway, plot: Robert De Niro’s wife thinks their marriage is irreconcilable, and then suicides herself in the bathtub. Daughter Dakota Fanning (who is a beautiful little girl; just ask anyone in the script) goes a little bit insane. After a poorly defined period of time, De Niro takes his daughter to a gigantic house in upstate New York, so that she’s not surrounded by memories. Instead, she’s surrounded by an empty house, a creepy-looking cave in the woods, and De Niro’s hands off parenting approach, learned, apparently, through years of careful psychologist-being.

Naturally, she has no choice but to invent an imaginary friend. Except, the friend starts creating lots of scary mayhem, leading the audience to wonder: is the little girl doing all the stuff she blames on Charlie? Or is it the creepy neighbor? The meddling real-estate agent? A giant lovable-but-without-social-graces bear who lives in the cave? A hillbilly with only three teeth, who lives in the cave? Whoever it is, good camera work and acceptable child-acting keep the tension and the mysteriousness high, so I’ll say no more lest I give it away. (It’s not the bear, though.)

I think it’s because it worked so well that the flaws grate on me. Elisabeth Shue wanders in and out of the movie as the aunt of young Dakota’s would-be local townie friend, who seems to maybe want to date De Niro. And he seems maybe to want to date her too. It’s played too low key to understand, and it doesn’t help that it feel like his wife has been dead just a handful of months.

The final act drags on for an eternity beyond the (very-well played) climax, removing a lot of the goodwill I had toward the film. And then, even worse, the final two scenes both contained pointless groaners that could easily have been avoided. My recommendation: See it. Good mood piece, decent creep factor and the thing where they make you want to know what’s actually going on. But after the climax (you’ll know it when it happens), move on to something else. Whatever ending you make up in your own mind will be superior.