Well executed horror

In a world gone drearily mad with sequels and recycled television shows, it is merely rhetorical to ask why anyone, including the savvy part-time producer Michael Bay, would revisit a stinker like the 1979 flick The Amityville Horror.

The answer, of course, is that these days, even the dumbest horror movie scares up decent big-screen business before being shuttled off to DVD perpetuity. Just as crucial, horror is relatively cheap to churn out, especially when the supporting cast features interchangeable no-name guys and gals, and the real star of the show -- in this case, a spacious waterfront Long Island house -- doesn't require its own trailer, a piece of the gross or any of the usual perquisites.

Still, given the crushing dullness of the first Amityville Horror, it seems baffling that it had any traction at all. James Brolin, sporting a head and face full of Charles Manson fuzz, and a wild-eyed Margot Kidder play a couple who snap up a palatial Long Island house for a song. Like the audience, the lovebirds already know that their new digs are shrouded in murder and mystery, but what takes them an agonizingly long time to realize -- despite all the miscellaneous creaking and escalating weirdness -- is that the house is possessed. The movie was the kind of thing beloved by bored teenagers and recreational drug users, two occasionally overlapping demographics, and was followed by a clutch of sequels that mostly went straight to video.

This latest visit to Long Island's favorite haunted house was co-produced by Bay, the director of such Jerry Bruckheimer-engineered blockbusters as Armageddon, and directed by Andrew Douglas, whose only other credit is for the provocatively titled Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Douglas takes an instrumental approach to the material, meaning he does what he can in as slickly commercial a fashion as possible. The writer this time is Scott Kosar, who also wrote Bay's equally serviceable remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and more interestingly, Brad Anderson's Machinist. Kosar builds on the story arc of the first Amityville, which shrouded a gruesome real-life multiple murder in a bunch of supernatural hooey, and predictably pumps up the gory violence. Don't get too attached to the family dog.

Set in the 1970's, the new Amityville stars an effective Ryan Reynolds as George Lutz, the hirsute paterfamilias with an easy smile and an unsettling fondness for chopping wood. Melissa George plays his wife, a widow and mother of three who, having recently married again, is still trying to get it right for her young brood and her new man. Despite the jittery realty agent, and an ugly stain marring a large swath of ceiling downstairs, and, oh yeah, the nasty revelation about the house being the site of a murderous family meltdown, the Dutch Colonial home looks like the American dream to the young couple. They take the homeowners' plunge, thereupon triggering various unfortunate events and, in time, a serious case of buyer's remorse.

Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original, partly because, from acting to bloody effects, it is better executed, and partly because the filmmakers have downgraded the role of the priest, played in all his vein-popping glory by Rod Steiger in the first film and by a considerably more subdued Philip Baker Hall here. Oddly, with these improvements, the filmmakers have removed Amityville from the realm of kitsch, perhaps with unintended results. In 1974, when a Long Island man turned Amityville into a crime scene by killing his family, there was something so novel about this kind of tragedy that it could be spun into a pop-cultural myth. These days, with the tight real estate market, I realized I didn't care one bit about anyone making it out alive -- I wanted the house.