THE AMITYVILLE HORROR 1979

Generally, I can think back to my adolescence and recall with relative clarity what it is I felt about most of the movies I saw at the time. What's perplexing is how often I fail to be blessed with the same level of recall when it comes to movies I've seen during my adult years. I was 21 when The Amityville Horror came out (not exactly yesterday, we're talking 39 years ago, folks); but thinking back on it, I can’t seem to remember exactly what I thought of then. I mean, did I find it even remotely scary? Did I buy into any of that “Based on a True Story” hype? Did I find it then, as I do now, to be an entertaining parade of haunted house clichés and hoary horror film tropes?

Worse, is there something metaphysically suspicious about my inability to remember? Hmmm….

James Brolin as George Lutz

Margot Kidder as Kathleen Lutz

Rod Steiger as Father Delaney

Don Stroud as Father Bolen

I have only the haziest memory of The Amityville Horror as the bestselling 1977 novel heavily promoted as being a fictionalization of the purported-to-be real-life story of a family beset by a series of paranormal events in their Long Island home which was at one time the site of a bloody mass murder. I had no interest in the book, nor do I even recall having paid much attention to news stories about the real-life DeFeo Murders which gave that distinctive-looking house its horror reputation. (On November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. killed his parents and four three siblings in the home they shared in Amityville, Long Island).

What I do remember is that the film version of The Amityville Horror opened in the summer of 1979: two months after Ridley Scott’s mind-blowing Alien; one month after the hotly anticipated (by me), but wholly disappointing John Frankenheimer monster movie Prophecy; and two weeks after the bloodless Dracula re-up with Frank Langella.

My rapturous fondness for Alien—a film that reminded me of how much fun it is to be scared at the movies—had put me into a horror film frame of mind that summer. Unfortunately, the diminishing scare returns proffered by the above-listed roster films left me looking forward to the opening of The Amityville Horror with an enthusiasm drastically disproportionate to my actual interest in the movie. 

The Amityville house lays out the unwelcome mat for Kathy's Aunt Helena (Irene Dailey)

Propelled by a hope for a replay of the kind of jump-out-of-my-seat thrills Alien served up so plentifully, plus a desire to see what actress Margot Kidder had chosen for her follow-up vehicle to her star-making turn as Lois Lane in the blockbuster Christmas 1978 release Superman: The Movie (still playing in second-run theaters at the time); I stood in a long line on Hollywood Blvd on Friday, July 27^th, to catch The Amityville Horror on opening night. The house was packed and the theater was abuzz with the kind of amped-up excitement only an R-rating, “Based on a True Story”-hype, and saturation marketing can produce (“For God’s Sake, Get Out!” screamed posters from billboards and bus shelters all over town).

Unspooling under a cloak of collective audience goodwill that began to dissipate around the film’s 60-minute mark—when animated squeals of delight and nervous giggles began to take on the hollow timbre of blatantly derisive laughter—The Amityville Horror made it clear that as a horror movie, it was devoted to treading familiar haunted house/demonic possession ground. In due time it became clear that the film was going to lean heavily on its claims of “This really happened!” as a means of mitigating the fact that the episodic screenplay was less a cohesive story and more of a laundry list of “Things that make you go hmmm…” events taking place in a creepy old house.

This House Pays For Itself
Kathy's brother (Marc Vahanian) preps for his wedding as the house preps for a little self-help

Although The Amityville Horror was a more polished and technically tricked-out film than I’d come to expect from the traditionally low-rent American International Pictures, for all its sound and fury (a disproportionate amount both coming from the grievously miscalculated performances of Rod Steiger and Helen Shaver) I grew aware of the fact that The Amityville Horror was in no danger of posing any threat to the legacies of The Exorcist or The Omen. The audience I was with seemed to enjoy the film’s low-wattage fright delivery system (regular as clockwork...3:15am to be exact) and didn't seem to mind that the film was serving up equal doses of laughs and frights. I was disappointed, but I was also entertained. I just wish I could remember if any aspects of the film actually scared me. What I do recall is that I returned to see The Amityville Horror the following week with a friend, and his conclusion was that the film was more of a “fun” scary movie (escapist and diverting) than a legitimately frightening one.

In chronicling the strange occurrences that befall cash-strapped newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz (Brolin & Kidder) and their three kids (Kathy’s from a previous marriage) when they move into the spacious, obscenely affordable house--that just so happens to have been the site of a brutal mass killing the year before, The Amityville Horror goes for the semi-documentary approach. Events are charted with title cards highlighting dates and times, a device serving both to chronicle the escalating "hauntings" and to further suggest what you're watching has been documented as fact. By doing so, The Amityville Horror is able to dispense with a lot of time otherwise devoted to establishing character and plot, and can simply dive headlong into the horrors its title promises.

Wasting no time, the film opens with graphic depictions of the shotgun murders of the DeFeo family (although they're never named in the film) following this up whenever possible with closeups of characters “feeling uneasy” in the presence of odd camera angles and an intrusive musical score. The house, distinctive, camera-ready, and treated to a great many jack-o-lantern closeups, is filmed from so many flattering angles, it becomes the Barbra Streisand of haunted houses: always at the dead-center of the action.

Since the Lutz family only lived in the house for a month it’s imperative that weird things start to happen to them right off the bat. Events unfold at such breakneck speed that only after the film has ended does it dawn that those nondescript Lutz kids never attend school and that George’s surveyor business suffers financial setbacks curiously disproportionate to how brief is his period of neglect. 

While George obsessively continues to chop logs for the fire,
Kathy laments the sudden wood shortage in their bedroom
...if you get my cruder meaning.

Because a haunted house/possession story is nothing without religious subtext, our Kathy is Catholic. Or, more precisely, Hollywood Catholic. Which means she doesn’t actually go to church or display any discernible traits of spiritual devoutness, but she does paint Virgin Mary figurines, hang ginormous crucifixes all over the house, has an actual nun in her immediate family, and is given to grocery shopping in a fetish-y Catholic School Girl uniform.

Kathy’s Catholic background occasions her inviting priest and friend Father Delaney (Steiger) to come and bless the house. A bad idea for the puffy priest, but a bonanza for lovers of uncured ham and unbridled scenery-chewing. The somber seriousness accorded Rod Steiger’s appearance is ostensibly meant to signal the graveness of the Lutz’s situation and escalate the film’s drama, but the actor's emoting is so over-the-top it merely opens a hell-gate of hilarity.

Fathers Delaney and Bowen, badly in need of a St. Christopher medal

The horror gauntlet is thrown down via a series of mysterious-to-life-threatening events which place the Lutzes in a race against time, the forces of evil, and their own thick-headedness. And if the objectives of these forces are conveyed in the vaguest terms possible (Revenge? Demonic possession? The endless reenactment of a violent past?), rest assured that the scope and severity of these paranormal assaults (Gates of hell? Native-American burial ground? Devil-worship? Bad juju?) are mind-bogglingly elastic, inconsistent, and convenient to plot contrivance.

In the end, the scariest thing about The Amityville Horror is that this family of five occupying a three-story colonial doesn’t seem to own a television set. The rest is a comfortably conventional, enjoyably cheesy, surprisingly by-the-numbers haunted house tale with its fair share of jump-cut shocks (hissing cats, loud noises, the old “I wake up screaming” trope, flashes of gore); a few genuine creep-outs (the shotgun murders, the locked closet door, that weird little girl who looks like Robert Blake in a wig); and more than a few unintentional laughs (Brolin’s eye-popping mood swings, the cut-rate haunting special effects, the cartoonish reactions of visitors to the house).

While Kathy & George stare aghast at the front door that's been mysteriously blown off its hinges,
viewers get to stare at James Brolin's cobblers

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I have a hunch that both my infatuation with Margot Kidder and my initial ignorance of the story behind The Amityville Horror made that 1979 opening night screening an enjoyable one. But I’m just as certain that subsequent viewings of the film have been rooted in how enjoyably routine a movie it is. That’s certainly the case today. When I look at the film now, it plays like an end-of-the-decade “best of” medley of all the supernatural horror films of the 1970s. 

You could make a drinking game of the clichés.

The malevolent demon, ineffectual cop, the invisible friend: The Exorcist

The too-inexpensive-to-be-true, parasitic house: Burnt Offerings

Religious mumbo-jumbo: The Omen

House built over the gates of hell: The Sentinel

Serial killer possession: The Possession of Joel Delaney

Going back for the pet: Alien

And for good measure, you have a movie with an axe-wielding dad that predates The Shining by one year, plus a hyperactive house built above a burial ground that predates Poltergeist by two.

Creepy Amy (Natasha Ryan) consults with Jody, her invisible friend

The overall effect is of The Amityville Horror being something of a goulash horror creation. Everything but the kitchen sink (or bile-spilling toilet) seems to have been thrown into this mechanical mix of sure-fire horror standbys. Nothing wrong with that, but the film is so overcrowded with disparate ideas that it ends up with a ton of loose threads and setups introduced that fail to pay off. Happily, the whole undertaking manages to be repetitious without ever really being boring, so the film ends up as being inoffensively watchable as one of those Creature Features horror programmers aired on TV when I was a kid.

PERFORMANCES

No matter the relative quality of the end results, no one associated with The Amityville Horror can be accused of phoning in their performance. A fact that proves to be both a blessing and a curse.

Screenwriter Sandor Stern and director Stuart Rosenberg both come from television, which may account for every dramatic scene seeming to be structured to end in a fade-out and commercial break. As though to compensate for the halting, stop-start pace, the entire cast performs at near-operatic pitch. 

Mr. Groovy Guy
Full beards and big, pouffy hair were all the rage in the '70s.
Here's Brolin with his gay porn doppelganger George Payne  

Although easy on the eyes, I can’t say James Brolin (he’ll always be Mr. Barbra Streisand to me) had ever made much of an impression on me during his days as "the young guy" on TVs Marcus Welby, M.D. Here, however, as the possessed George Lutz, Brolin has so many scenes where he gets to bellow, shout, and bug his eyes out, he quickly became my favorite character in the film. He's so consistently bitchy and surly, it's like watching a hirsute Joan Crawford.

Margot Kidder, something of an early scream queen what with her roles in Sisters, Black Christmas, and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, is the film’s bright spot. Unfortunately she's saddled with a role that has her doing what bad writers always have women do in horror movies: screaming and going around asking everybody if they’re OK. I love watching her though, and she remains a natural and charismatic presence even in the film’s most absurd moments. 

Rod Steiger, praying for an Oscar nomination

In what I can only hope was a Karen Black-like bid on Rod Steiger's part to invest The Amityville Horror with a little emotional gravitas (Black approached her role in the nonsensical Airport ’75 with intense solemnity because she felt no one else in the film was taking it seriously), Steiger—never a particularly subtle actor—in trying to convey spiritual anguish and fear, only succeeds in going full-tilt Neely O’Hara/Mommie Dearest on us.

As the concerned priest who becomes the target of the malevolent forces inhabiting the house, Steiger invests every moment onscreen with such ferocious overacting, I seriously thought in one scene his head was going to explode like that fellow in Scanners. Perhaps Steiger should be given credit for taking risks and being committed to the role, but it simply feels far too strenuous and undisciplined. His priest is off the rails before we get a chance to know anything about him.

Helen Shaver and Michael Sacks (Slaughterhouse Five) as family friends Carolyn and Jeff.
Playing a New-Age type, I'm not sure whose idea it was to have Shaver pitch her performance so high on the weird-o-meter, but her big scene in the Lutz's basement is listed in the dictionary under "overkill" 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Amityville Horror is guilty of not being very scary, which is a bit of a crime given that “horror” is part of the title. But, as someone once said about life (and goes double for motion pictures): “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.” I could call this movie a lot of things, but boring isn't one of them; for what The Amityville Horror skimps on in thrills, logic, and coherence, it more than makes up for in unintentional laughs.

In 1979 when The Amityville Horror had its best chance of being taken seriously, public appetites were still so hungry for the next The Exorcist that the film became one of the highest grossers of the year. But that didn’t stop the opening night audience I saw it with from still appreciating the occasional laugh at the film’s expense.

Nauseous, sweating profusely, covered in flies, and witness to a door opening all by itself, 
Father Delaney has second thoughts about priests making house calls 

Margot Kidder and Lalo Schifrin's Oscar-nominated score work like Trojans trying to convince us that Kathy Lutz has seen something unspeakably terrifying outside of her daughter's second-story bedroom window. Regrettably, a cut to Kathy's POV reveals "glowing red eyes" that look for all the world like outdoor Christmas lights

Amity meets Amityville
Actor Murray Hamilton, who played the Doubting Thomas mayor of Amity in Jaws, this time out plays a Doubting Thomas priest. His brief scene in the film is memorable for the manner in which he commands a (still) frothing at the mouth Rod Steiger to sit down. It's like he's training an overgrown Bullmastiff 

Over the years, The Amityville Horror has spawned something like 15 Amityville-related sequels, remakes, and spinoffs. I don't know if this qualifies the original as some kind of minor classic or a mere franchise fluke; but for whatever reasons, The Amityville Horror (even with its always dubious claims to reality since debunked) has proved to be a movie that endures.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson

GAMES 1967

Sometimes being a movie star just means having enough “brand name recognition” to bring to each movie a kind of distinct, firmly established name-association (a personality cachet, if you will) fully-formed and locked in place from a previous film. 

For example: to a large segment of the population Mia Farrow was and always will be Rosemary Woodhouse of Rosemary’s Baby. The films See No Evil (1971), The Haunting of Julia (1977) and the 2006 remake of The Omen all banked on the public associating Farrow with the macabre and horrific. None perhaps so blatantly or swiftly as Joseph Losey’s difficult-to-market 1968 psychological thriller Secret Ceremony, which was released only four months after Rosemary’s Baby opened. Although the film starred Hollywood heavyweights Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum in their only screen pairing, ads emphasized what was then the film’s one sure-fire property: Mia  Farrow - “More haunted than in Rosemary’s Baby!” the posters screamed.  

Satan Place
 Occult rituals are just one of many perverse diversions in Games

After the success of Halloween (1978) critics began hailing director John Carpenter as a worthy successor to Alfred Hitchcock. Hoping to further encourage such comparisons, Carpenter cast perennially Hitchcock-associated actress Janet Leigh in a thoroughly arbitrary role in his 1980 film The Fog. Janet Leigh, who should be commended for not having turned the entirety of her latter years into one long series of stunt-casting parts cashing in on her iconic Psycho role, did allow her image to be exploited just one more time - in the 1998 Halloween sequel, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (check out IMDB’s Trivia section for details) although it must be said these nothing roles at least afforded her the opportunity to appear onscreen with real-life daughter Jamie Lee Curtis.

Desensitization
A well-appointed game room features violent Roy Lichtenstein pop-art and a pinball machine that awards points for driving fatalities

In 1968, if American audiences knew much about French film star Simone Signoret at all (and they didn't) it was on the strength of three films: her Oscar- winning role in Room at the Top (1959); her Oscar-nominated turn in Stanley Kramer’s prestige flop, Ship of Fools; and… most popularly and most likely, the highly acclaimed and influential thriller Diabolique (1955). Internet sources maintain that the starring role of Lisa Schindler, the mysterious visitor in Games, was originally written for Marlene Dietrich, and when producers balked, the role was offered to Jeanne Moreau, who also declined. All of which may well be true. But after looking at this clever thriller full of twists and mysterious turns, the overwhelming evidence leans towards my belief that Games was conceived and written expressly to capitalize on and exploit the American public’s familiarity with Signoret’s starring role in Clouzot’s bloodcurdling French chiller.

Simone Signoret as Lisa Schindler

Katharine Ross as Jennifer Montgomery

James Caan as Paul Montgomery

Like most good thrillers, the premise of Games is marvelously simple. A well-to-do but eccentric young couple  who like to engage in elaborate games and practical jokes (Caan and Ross) meets their match when a mysterious French stranger (guess who) enters their lives. The couple, both blasé dilettantes dabbling in chic nihilism, prove no match for the genuine article.

Brando-ish 70's TV stalwart, Don Stroud (who five years later would appear as a nude centerfold in Playgirl magazine) plays Norman, the oversexed box boy. Another player in Games 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Compensating perhaps for all those years of hyperactivity in my youth, I’ve discovered of late that I’m remarkably adroit at being sedentary. It's a revelation to me that in my dotage I find I no longer go in search of thrills, but prefer instead for my thrills come to me. Ill-disposed as I am to amusement park rides, fast cars, or any activity calling for the deployment of adrenaline, I have become a huge fan of armchair adventure. I love mysteries, suspense thrillers, horror films (horror as in dread, not gore) and movie plotting that stays one step ahead of me. Even when a film has plot twists which can be figured out if one really puts their mind to it (as some claim to be the case with Games), I so enjoy the big “reveal” in these kinds of movies that I've learned over the years how not to spoil my own fun. I employ a subtle form of self-hypnosis, allow the plot to unfold before me and just let myself surrender to the director’s pace, trying not to put the pieces of the puzzle together unless the film leads me there first.

Identity and Illusion

Games is almost theatrical in its construct, as it’s sparsely populated (four principal characters) and takes place primarily in a single location (the tony townhouse of Paul and Jennifer Montgomery). Tension is derived from the uneasiness of having a cast of characters, none of whom we’re told very much about but all overtly fond of playing mind-games, interacting in both real and contrived situations. As it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain whether a game has begun, ended, or is underway, it soon dawns that the film itself is but another of the games. One that we in the audience (like several of the characters in the movie) weren't aware we were playing.

PERFORMANCES

Regrettably, for all the fun to be had in watching Games (like the 1972 film adaptation of Anthony Schaeffer’s Sleuth, its pleasures don’t diminish even after its surprises are revealed) I can’t say it’s a film one is likely to remember for the performances. In just a few short years the producers of Games probably wouldn't have been able to afford either Katharine Ross or James Caan, but at this point in their young careers the future superstars are shown visibly trying to find their footing in this stylish thriller. Though falling short of making me really feel for the plight of the caracters, I've no real complaint with the beautiful Katharine Ross who is always an appealingly natural presence and is, I think,  actually better here than she is in The Graduate. She definitely comes off much better than Caan, who seems a tad stiff trying to play an urbane sophisticate who's still a little rough around the edges. 

Simone Signoret claimed responsibility for bringing Katharine Ross to the attention of director Mike Nichols when he was casting The Graduate

The ever-watchable Simone Signoret has had many finer moments on the screen and has certainly been photographed to better advantage than she is here, but for me, she is a dynamic screen presence and gives the film the garvitas it most certainly needs. Acting-wise, little is demanded of her save to appear mysterious and give off an air of European ambiguity in the face of Yankee frankness; but she's one of those less-is-more actressess who don't require showy display. She's fine as she is merely exuding style and a kind of debauched regalness.

Something Wicked This Way Comes?
Oddly unsettling artwork (Roy Lichtenstein?) dominates this shot and adds a sense of apprehension and danger to the scene

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Paul and Jennifer Montgomery are the idle wealthy. A little too much money and too much time on their hands extends to their eccentric collection of modern art. The pieces, whimsical and absurd works displayed throughout their spacious New York townhouse, create the effect that we are watching events play out on an oversized game board or inside a pinball machine.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The first time I saw Games was when it aired on NBC-TV back in the early '70s. I recall I'd found it to be very much the unsettling suspenser, keeping me on the edge of my seat as the swift turns of plot not only taking me by surprise but scaring the hell out of me. No longer a kid and revisiting it on DVD some 30 years later, I was prepared for it to be a nice, tame nostalgia trip with maybe the distraction of camp taking the place of the suspense.
Not the case. The years may have shaved a little of the originality off its plot, but the effectiveness of the film itself - the sustaining of mood, the building of suspense, the unforeseen twists - it all worked for me just as persuasively as when I first saw it in my youth. In fact, much of the film played better in some instances; particularly in my taking note of all the foreshadowing in events, and the allusions made to the articficiality and contrivance of pop-culture,  pop-art,and pop-amorality.

Although the term hipster didn't exist in 1967 in the context it's used today, James Caan and Katharine Ross play a 60s version of just the kind of obnoxiously trendy urban couple you might find yourself rooting for something bad to happen to.

Games is no classic, and to some it will look a great deal like a well-made '70s TV movie. But as suspense thrillers go (and when was the last time a good one of those appeared on the horizon?), I have to say, flaws and all, Games comes out looking like a winner.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2013