The Amityville Horror: Critic Reviews

Nothing gets in the way of the rote staging, the ham-handed predictability, the feeling that you've been to this house, and yawned at these ghosts, once too often.

Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original.

In this Amityville, the performances are bad, the special effects ho-hum, and it's not even particularly scary.

You'll want to get out of Amityville long before the Lutzes do.

A gory lark, a cheap-thrill-packed love poem to the history of the contemporary horror film.

Not content to remake an old, mediocre horror movie, this Amityville takes its cues from current mediocre horror movies, too. This one is frightening only if you can't remember the last throwaway movie that leaned on all the same tricks.

The Amityville Horror is a Xerox so tattered and faded that it's impossible to determine who's to blame for the overproduced mediocrity before our eyes.

A cut-to-order MTV hack attack. Audiences will be stunned not because they have been frightened but by how obvious and safe the whole thing is.

Like good drive-in fare from the '70s, this is all about sensation.

Watching The Amityville Horror is about as enjoyable as attending a Halloween party hosted by people you can barely tolerate.

Since Scream poured irony into the mix, it has become mighty hard to write a line of dialogue that doesn't elicit winks and nods. We all know where the mayhem's leading.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there.

Despite Andrew Douglas' tightly focused direction, this is a cheap, calculated scare.

If they scare up enough business to perpetuate this sort of retread, that will be the real horror.

Completely cheesy and mildly enjoyable.

If star Ryan Reynolds wants to scare us, why not just lock us in a room and make us watch Van Wilder over and over? Or have girlfriend Alanis Morissette talk about her past relationships?

A few lines get laughs, but the horror is standard fare, without a shred of innovation.

Begins slavishly faithful to its low-key 1970s predecessor then sledgehammers auds with a numbing succession of shock edits and over-the-top horror effects.

Shoddily made, boring and, most shockingly, without a single decent scare.

The original is still creepy, but this Horror will have fans jumping in their seats and talking back to the screen.

Brevity is the single best thing about it.

A sustained if wildly unco-ordinated assault on our senses (our emotions are clearly not on his battle map), complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliche of equally stunning proportions.

I wasn't shocked by The Amityville Horror, or outraged by it: I felt nothing but disdain.

In a ghost story, the narrative doesn't have to be a model of originality or coherence, but it needs to support the scares. In The Amityville Horror, the writing is so bad that it detracts from the 'boo!' moments and creepy interludes.

Shorter and punchier but nearly as hokey as the original.