The Amityville Horror – Blu-ray Review

By Frankie Dees Oct 14, 2008, 15:26 GMT

There\'s no place like home...for bloodcurdling horror! James Brolin Margot Kidder and Academy Award® winner* Rod Steiger fall prey to the powers of darkness in this spine-tingling tale of a house possessed by unspeakable evil. One of the most talked-about haunted-house stories of all time The Amityville Horror will hit you where you live. For George and Kathy Lutz the colonial home on the river\'s edge seemed ideal: quaint spacious ...more

While I can't quite call it a horror classic, 1979's 'The Amityville Horror' was highly successful at the time owing mostly to being based on the media-saturated true story of a family forced to leave their house after 28 days claiming it was haunted.

Spawning numerous sequels as well as its own remake in 2005, the original makes its Blu-Ray debut in underwhelming fashion. 

Today, the film is charmingly trite considering a key reveal that scared the crap out of audiences in 1979 is now a bad optical effect of what looks like a demon pig standing in front of a window. And, no, I'm not talking about Rod Steiger whose performance could also be chalked up as a painfully aged effect.

Luckily, demon pig only pops up once with most of the scares coming from other well-known horror clichés - the cat jump, the window slam, bleeding walls, etc. - and if nothing terribly exciting happens, it's at the very least never boring. 

Based on the true story of the Lutz family who scored the house on the cheap when a previous tenant shot and killed his own family in it, the film starts with the Lutz's, or the Putz's as I like to call 'em considering all of the bonehead decisions they make during the course of the film, moving into the house well aware of the murders that took place.

George and Kathy Lutz (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) are proto-yuppie newlyweds but with Kathy's three moppets in tow (bummer, George!), they need a little room to stretch out. 

Right off, strange things are a-happening as George becomes increasingly moody and takes up a new hobby of constantly sharpening axes and in one of the more ridiculous subplots in mainstream horror, Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) comes over to bless the house and gets run off by flies and a seemingly Hell-emanated voice telling him to 'Get out!'.

Attempting to call Kathy, he constantly gets thwarted by unseen forces and his superiors in the local diocese don't take him or his junior-sidekick priest Father Bolen (Don Stroud) seriously. 

So the Putz's inexplicably stick around in spite of any number of evil things happening around them short of the devil himself showing up to hand them an eviction notice and ... that's pretty much it.

Although this pic came out a year before 'The Shining', it's hard to know what similar events were borrowed between source novels. A father slowly losing his grip on reality with a penchant for axes is the main climatic theme in both but watching this film now, it certainly comes across as sub-tier 'Shining'. 

'The Amityville Horror' gets a 1080p/AVC MPEG4 1.85:1 encode and the results are definitely better than Fox's other catalog horror Blu release 'Carrie' if still nothing to get your high-def TV all hot and bothered.

The source is in good shape and sharpness and detail in the picture is competent but the color palette of the film is inherently a bit flat and muted. This is probably the best this film will look so take that for what you will. A DTS-HD lossless 5.1 track is provided which sounds fine for a film of this age. 

Par for the course for a Fox catalog release, only an original theatrical trailer is included with none of the bonus features found on the Special Edition DVD making the transition including a cool doc about the real-life Lutz tale that I still remember. Why Fox, why?

I'm not really a huge fan of the film and this high-def package is merely fine in the video/audio department and sorely lacking in special features, special features that already out there too mind you…so if you're a fan of the film and you have the old DVD, I would probably say pass. 

The Amityville Horror [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon. Visit the DVD database for more information.