Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35945 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-10-22
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Danish, Dutch, English, Norwegian, Swedish
• Dubbed in: French, Italian, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 113 minutes

DVD Description
Based on the chilling best seller, this spooky study in psychological terror throws open the doors to your deepest, darkest fears!

Special Features
1.85 Wide Screen
16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 9
French\Italian\Spanish
English
English
Region 2
Mono English\French\Italian\Spanish
Mono
Original Theatrical Trailer
Interactive Menu Screens
Chapter Selections
Danish\Dutch\English\Norwegian\Swedish

Synopsis
A family's Long Island dream home becomes a horrific nightmare in this chilling tale, supposedly based on a true story. The brutal murder of six people just one year previous causes the new tenants (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) some restless nights, to say the least. Ooze comes out of the walls, doors mysteriously and violently swing open, and flies descend. Soon priests (including Rod Steiger) are called in to exorcise the house, but even they may not be able to stop the unexplained occurrences.

Customer Reviews

Great potential, run-of-the-mill outcome
The film opens with a house silhouetted against the lightning of a thunderstorm, its attic windows gleaming like malign eyes. We hear shots, see flashes, perceive that murder and mayhem have taken place within. Four children and their parents, we learn, have been ruthlessly executed … inexplicably.

A year later and Margot Kidder and James Spader fall in love with this isolated, lakeside property. It's a very American house - colonial stylised, white wooden boards, hipped roof, three stories, and those windows looking out morosely on the world. The couple know the house's provenance, but are unconcerned - "Houses don't have memories".

Enter Rod Steiger, come to bless this house - we get the sounds of maliciously laughing children, see flies beating themselves against the window pane. The house is telling him to get out. Even the phone refuses to accept his incoming calls. This is exorcism in reverse - the self-possessed house drives out and drives off the priest. Steiger is left doubting his sanity … and denying the significance of his actions.

The family will soon begin to elaborate their own reactions to the house's claustrophobic atmosphere - he begins to tense up, to become over-familiar with an axe, to develop that thousand psychoses stare, she begins to feel she is being watched, their daughter develops an imaginary friend.

This is a film which strives hard to create atmosphere without ever really achieving any. The imagery of the flies is almost excellent, but this contrasts with the numbing effect of the insipid, annoying "spooky" music which is injected from time to time. Steiger has some good moments. Margot Kidder is outstanding as a woman whose growing doubts become concrete certainties.

But the direction seems a touch flaccid. We become trapped in the house when the better story is in the problems experienced by the Church - Steiger is a priest who is also a psychoanalyst, his young assistant has recently returned from Viet Nam where he has seen horror a plenty. This is a film which could have played with scepticism, doubt, rationalism, and religion, and instead it becomes dumbed down into questions of real estate and why the house has harboured so much evil.

Bad horror can be dreadful. Today's good horror is not necessarily all that good ten years later - horror seems to date faster than most genres. 'The Amityville Horror' was based on a supposedly 'true' story, and acquired a certain amount of gratuitous notoriety because of that. But the hoax is old news, and what was once a competent if cheesy film is now of more interest to the historian of the genre than to the fan of horror. An interesting movie, with some good moments and some worthy efforts by Kidder and Steiger - go for the Special Edition version because the extras are well worth it and turn a three star rating into a four.

The original and best
George Lutz and Kathy Lutz, recently married and buying a house together, Kathy has her kids from her previous marriage but George loves them and intends to riase them as his own. The house they view seems too good to be true, its huge, three floors, cabin to keep the family boat in and a potting shed.
They love it from the start.
The house has a past and they are aware of that, a young man slaughtered his family there in the night and later claimed voices told him to do it. Still, they move in because the house is far more than they could hope to ever afford had it not got a chequered past.
They are happy - settling in and getting the place decorated and such, the daugther claims to have made an imaginary friend, the troubling thing is that she says she used to live there and while it is a little unsettling the parents don't tend to treat it as serious.
Of the two boys one of them gets badly injured when a window previously latched falls onto his fingers, a priest calls to bless the house and is ejected by a venomous voice that advises him to get out - he falls really ill after trying to get his superiors to see that something really terrible was happening in that house and whenever Kathy tries to contact him her phone line gets fuzzy...
George is having a nervous breakdown, he seems ill and distant, Kathy's aunt, a nun, comes to visit and also has to leave the house suddenly, to be violently ill on her way home.
The house seems to have it's own life and seems hellbent on making the past repeat itself.
The best of all Amityville films made - atmosphere and scares that aren't as in your face as the remakes. Big scares don't always need to be obvious. Watch this before the remake, you'll be glad you did.

Amityville Horror
Fans of this francise will love the orginal, although the special effects maybe dated by todays standards you'll still be in for some shocks along the way... An all time haunted house classic, forget the haunting and the house on haunted hill, this is the house that even in the 80's will make it's 90's counter parts look pail and class less...