"The Amityville Horror," Ryan Reynolds takes his shirt off... a lot.

The Amityville Horror
We get it, Ryan Reynolds has a good physique...

"The Amityville Horror" is the next horror movie in the recent trend of horror remakes. How does this one do? Well I think it did what it set out to do and that was to scare people. Now it isn't as scary as I thought it might be but it was still decent.

"The Amityville Horror" is of course based on that infamous Long Island home where a man was told to kill his entire family by voices. Fast forward one year and we meet the Lutz family. George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) is in a new relationship with Kathy(Melissa George). I guess they are newlyweds since one of the annoying kids asked if he was supposed to call George "dad" or not. I say "I guess" because it is never really disclosed what they are. This is where the biggest problem of the movie comes from, plot holes. Lots and lots and lots of plotholes. It was if the writers were intentionally trying to sabotage their own project with the sheer ammount of unanswered questions. One scene has George discovering boat keys in Billy's(Jesse James aka "that kid from the Butterfly Effect") room. However we never know how, why, or when he got the keys. It has absolutely no point to it. Another scene, and a huge part of the plot, is the little girl Chelsea's (Chloe Moretz) relationship with dead girl Jodie(Isabelle Conner). Jodie was one of the family members murdered one year earlier. She is one of the main driving forces of the story but we don't get any explanation to why she is still hanging around the house or why she can hang around the house. Is she there to hurt them? In one scene she has convinced Chelsea to jump off the roof yet in another she is trying to protect them from the "bad man" that lives in the basement. Anyway as the 28 days progress (they only stayed in the house 28 days before fleeing) George starts to lose touch of reality. Everytime the clock strikes 3:15am, you know something is going to happen. However George goes in and out of sanity more than truly going insane. My favorite scene was with him and Billy chopping wood. "We're friends, we're having fun!" Best line in the movie. Also, I think the writers did rewrites on set in order to find another excuse to have Reynolds take his shirt off. Seriously, the dude takes his shirt off at least 4 times during the movie. Anyway the movie moves along at a fast pace and it may have been a little too fast. The movie's runtime is only 85 minutes long. However considering how boring the parts of the orignal that I saw were, this is not a bad thing. The story is predicatable since you already know they are going to eventually get out of the house. Still the origin of the house makes sense and the true villain being revealed was cool. Whether or not it is true or not, is for you to decide.

The scares in this film are pretty good. However not as scary as I thought it would be, it was still fun. The scares in the movie are "BOO" scares. It could also be compared to being punched in the stomach one time and having your attacker flee only to come back and do the same thing 10 more times. It isn't a constant sense of uncertainty. You know when stuff is going to happen and when you, as an audience, are safe. Even with the plotholes and predictability, it doesn't stop being fun. And really, what more can you ask for?

Final Score
3.5/5