There's A Place On Ocean Avenue

Year: 1979

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

Cast: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger 

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s October again, which means that Popcorn Culture’s stern turns once more toward a franchise that hasn’t yet been covered on the pages of this here blog. Those are getting harder and harder to come by, but this year I’ve made the phenomenally stupid decision to tackle my horror movie Mount Everest: the outrageously expansive haunted house franchise The Amityville Horror.

It’s incredibly difficult, almost impossible in fact, to decipher what even counts as an “official” Amityville Horror sequel and what it merely a cheap rip-off with Amityville in the title. You could describe essentially every Friday the 13th sequel that very same way, but the difficulty stems from the fact that this franchise is based on a true [sic] story and you can’t copyright the name of an actual real-life town. Nevertheless, it’s time to brush back the cobwebs and take a long DeLorean ride back to that distant era of 1979. We’re knocking on the door of the very first entry in this sprawling cinematic pile: Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror.

Get out while you still can!

So. We’re in Amityville, as you’ve probably guessed. Enter the Lutz family: George (James Brolin), Kathy (Margot Kidder), and their three mostly interchangeable moppets. Their funds are tight, but they find a sweet deal on a lakeside house with creepy windows that resemble a pair of glaring eyes. As it turns out, the house was the site of a brutal murder a year prior, where a young man shot his entire family and then himself. The house also may or may not have been built on a Satanic ritual site or something. The film offers up many possible spooky explanations, but commits to none of them because at this point in time, they were at least pretending to be delivering the facts in this real life story.

Anyway, over the next month, paranormal happenings begin to slowly accumulate into what could only charitably be called a crescendo: spooky eyes appear outside the window, one of the girl children acquires a very opinionated imaginary friend named Jody, and Kathy’s visiting spiritual guardian Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) falls terribly ill after visiting the property. While Delany argues in favor of an exorcism with the obtuse Father Ryan (Murray Hamilton, who apparently made a career out of committing innocent suburbanites to bleak fates after playing the Mayor in Jaws), George Lutz’ sanity slowly begins to break apart, mirroring the murderous impulses of the previous owner.

And skipping all his barbershop appointments.

The Amityville Horror is a household name horror film, the second highest-grossing movie of the year (behind Kramer vs. Kramer, a number one smash that would never happen in today’s cinema climate). So it has to be great, right? Right?!

Truth be told, I have no idea why this film is so renowned, other than the fact that it’s based on an incredibly popular book/true-ish story. But against all odds, it was a zeitgeist tale that captured the public imagination the time. And yet the film is just unspeakably dull.

It has its share of spooky flourishes, but even at the time there wasn’t a single thing original about it, and the good bits are spaced punishingly far apart, considering how uninspired they tend to be (ironically, The Conjuring cribs a huge portion of its set design from this movie, and its sequel even steals an entire scare gag). The Haunting had already cemented in the tropes a good 16 years before, and two great movies reworking a lot of the same ideas would arrive a mere year later to prove just how incompetent Amityville was at its own game: The Shining and The Changeling.

All cliché and no plot makes George a dull boy.

It’s just so damn episodic. The film is shackled by its devotion to the “reality” of the case, refusing to allow itself to depict events in anything but the most rigorously detailed, diary-esque way. Day after day slides by with little consequence, setting up a boil so slow it’s almost imperceptible, barely reaching “lukewarm” before the credits roll.

All this is interspersed with Rod Steiger’s increasingly desperate attempts to save the family. These scenes are everything the Lutz material is not (the only quality they both share is that they’re terrible). Steiger’s scenes ditch the low-key atmosphere in favor of stilted melodrama and a bizarre crib from The Exorcist with no stakes whatsoever that appears to affect the plot not one whit. Steiger almost always ends up shouting at the top of his lungs, his eyes threatening to bulge out of their sockets. 

These scenes fit into the rest of the film like a square peg in a boring screenplay.

Unfortunately (because this must be the reason people still feel compelled to watch it), there is some good to be discovered here. Lalo Schifrin’s score has a haunting quality to its childlike chorus, the house exterior is an incredible feat of mundanely sinister design, and the opening murder scene is restrained and subtle in a way that actually heightens the tension.

And OK fine, there is one unequivocally terrific scene, in which a babysitter gets trapped in the little girl’s closet, forced to beat at the door until her knuckles are bloody. As for everything else, it’s just ephemeral. Nothing of major consequence happens for 70 minutes, nobody seems to be in any real danger even after that, and the story just peters out with an exhausted whimper.

The Amityville Horror is certainly not worthy of the haunted house pantheon it more or less presides over, though that box office pull proves that it was worthy of a dozen f**king sequels, at least in the eyes of Hollywood. I’m already fatigued by this marathon and it’s literally the first day… Wish me luck.

TL;DR: The Amityville Horror is a minted classic for no reason I can discern.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1002
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

Census Bloodbath: Happy Fearth of July!

Year: 1988

Director: John Hough

Cast: Yvonne DeCarlo, Rod Steiger, Sarah Torgov

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Again we wade into that strange holiday netherworld in which I watch a festivity-appropriate movie on the day of, but don't get a chance to review it until a day later. So I apologize for not reviewing my Fourth of July pick, 1988's American Gothic, until today, but believe me it's worth the wait.

Since we haven't really talked about the climate of 1988 in detail yet, let me paint you a picture. By the end of the decade, the slasher genre was a grotesque and decadent monstrosity lumbering across the plains of cinema. After the advent of home video, DTV slashers had inundated the market, overwatering the already twisted root that was the subgenre.

If you picked any slasher film from the year at random, you would likely find a bloated franchise picture (Friday the 13th Part VII, Halloween 4, Sleepaway Camp II, etc.), a post-Nightmare supernatural twist on the tropes (Bad Dreams, Deadly Dreams, Ghosthouse), or one of a few DTV stragglers that held on to the traditional slice and dice ways with an iron grip (Death Nurse 2, The Last Slumber Party, Amsterdamned).

At this point, it was a genre set in stone with an increasingly bloodthirsty MPAA slashing out gory scenes left and right. Without the appeal of being a shiny new genre or shocking the audience with bloody kills, desperate slashers were grabbing at straws, eager to find anything twisted and exciting to make a quick buck. Usually these films crashed and burned, but American Gothic is a special little monster that almost certainly deserves more attention than it gets.

OK, maybe not that much attention.

The story goes as such. A group of friends traveling to an island in the Pacific Northwest has their propellor plane break down halfway there. They make an emergency landing on nearby shore and decide that an island is an island, so they can camp here until they repair their plane.

The Meat in this film is an exceptionally uninteresting crop, save for one standout, but when something stands out in this movie, it stands the hell out. First there's your usual crop of clichés like Paul (Stephen Shellen, also in The Stepfather), the cute man with glasses who is offscreen for a good two thirds of the film; Lynn (Fiona Hutchison), this film's nomination for Most Slappable Douchebag;  Terri (Caroline Barclay), a terrible actress and scuba diving enthusiast; Rob (Mark Lindsay Chapman), a handsome and playful young man unfortunately saddled with the worst mullet in human history; Jeff (Mark Erickson) an annoying blonde with a Jew Fro and a pilot's license; and Cynthia (Sarah Torgov), his wife and purveyor of that interest I was referring to earlier.

You see, Cynthia has agreed to go on this trip in order to get over the accidental drowning of her child, the trauma of which led her to be institutionalized. The movie begins with her release, opening on a shot of her trapped behind bars.

It's a metaphor, see?

When the group goes exploring, they discover a large home full of 50-year-old toys and furniture. Instead of running away immediately, they play dress-up with clothes from a wardrobe and dance the Charleston because trespassing is OK as long as it's on an island. Needless to say, when the elderly homeowners return, they're none too pleased, although they do invite the youngsters to stay for the night.

At first Ma (Yvonne DeCarlo, also of Silent Scream) and Pa (Rod Steiger), as they prefer to be called, seem just a wee bit eccentric (their religious fervor shows just a tad too strongly and they won't let anybody near the basement door), but once their three children begin to appear from out of the woodwork (it takes literally several days for all three of them to make their presence known), the travelers grow suspicious.

You see, these kids are actually middle aged men and women who act and dress like they're 12 years old. Fanny (Janet Wright), Woody (Michael J. Pollard, also of Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland), and Teddy (William Hootkins) seem to believe wholeheartedly not only that they're young and hearty, but that it is the 1920's and the era of President Woodrow Wilson.

This is mighty unsettling, but the best of the three actors is Wright, who captures a sort of Umbridge-esque menace while at the same time 100% accurately portraying the simple emotions and responses that an 11-year-old girl would have to her environment.

Needless to say, the family begins to bump off the group one by one because they perceive them to be sinners. This idea isn't helped by many of the members' utterly oblivious smoking, swearing, and sexing. I know this is the way of the slasher world - you drink, you screw, you die - but never has the way to avoid meeting a grisly end seemed so obvious from the get-go.

Maybe don't willingly piss off people insane enough to wear these outfits.

Before we go on, let's get one thing straight. American Gothic is a poorly made film, but not as bereft of artistry as the typical genre entries this late into the decade tended to be. Sure, maybe the boom mike totally eclipses a quarter of the frame in an early shot. Sure, maybe the ancient house looks freshly painted and underpopulated like the production designer constructed it that day and bought whatever he could find for fifty bucks at a thrift shop.

There's little to no gore in the film thanks to the dictatorial rule of the MPAA but somehow, miraculously, the filmmakers took what they had and turned it into a near masterpiece of bonkers B-cinema. The kills are clever and compensate with humor and tension instead of gore (Rob is swung over a cliff via swingset, a long-forgotten Paul turns up dead at the worst possible moment). And despite the limitations of the budget, American Gothic manages to ramp up the creep factor more than any other slasher in the tail end of the decade.

Sure, it's in a campy register. But if you combine the fun of the kills and the totally bizarre characterizations of the killers along with the surprisingly resonant thematic through line provided by Cynthia as she navigates this world of long-preserved children while coping with the loss of her own, the movie transcends everything and becomes startlingly capable. One memorable scene with a mummified infant corpse still manages to be utterly chilling despite the fact that it looks like an alien sculpture made of raisins. 

And if you show me a person who says they don't find this even slightly unsettling, I'll show you a liar.

This goes on for about an hour, at which point the film just gives up and launches into an entirely new storyline. It feels like the sequel to this film was tacked onto its final thirty minutes. It constantly goes places you never expected it to go and defies any and all expectations, all while maintaining its status as a tacky and silly slasher film.

I won't spoil this half, so lunacy-filled as it is, because I'd rather have everybody experience it on their own terms. But let me just say the final shot actually proves that there was at least a smidgen of talent behind the camera and reminds one of The Descent in a mystifyingly positive way.

This film is a terrific story of a family trapped in time wrapped with a slasher bow and I thought it was great fun. It's not truly scary and it won't be getting on anybody's top ten lists unless you pare it down to the most specific of subsets, but American Gothic will certainly become a new classic in the Brennan household.

Killer: Ma (Yvonne DeCarlo), Pa (Rod Steiger), and their Brood (Janet Wright, Michael J. Pollard, William Hootkins)

Final Girl: Cynthia (Sarah Torgov)

Best Kill: They're all lovely, but I'm rather partial to Rob getting swung over a cliff, to which nobody really has any reaction.

Sign of the Times: Aside from Rob's mullet, he listens to that instrumental (copyright-free) 80's rock that all slasher kids seem to be so into.

Scariest Moment: Fanny asks Cynthia to kiss her baby good night.

Weirdest Moment: Take your pick, this is a deeply weird movie. But I'm personally in favor of when Rob tries to get everybody to dance by shouting "C'mon, gang!" at them repeatedly like he's in a 60's sitcom.

Champion Dialogue: "Don't you wanna be in the clean plate club?"

Body Count: 10; 5 vacationers and 5 killers

1. Rob is tossed over a cliff via swingset.
2. Lynn is hung with a jumprope.
3. Jeff is stabbed in the eye with a toy soldier's bayonet.
4. Paul is axed in the face offscreen.
5. Terri has her neck snapped.
6. Fanny is beaten to death with a tin bathtub.
7. Woody is stabbed with a toy soldier's bayonet.
8. Ma is stabbed with knitting needles.
9. Teddy is stabbed in the neck with a scythe.
10. Pa is shot in the chest with a shotgun. 

TL;DR: American Gothic is a fascinating curio and worth more attention than it gets.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1544