The Amityville Murders

Jay Anson’s allegedly nonfiction 1977 book The Amityville Horror—about the terrifying experiences that a family endured in a supposedly haunted Long Island house—was made into a movie two years later, and the story has been a cinematic staple ever since. Writer-director Daniel Farrands here serves up a chintzy recreation of Butch DeFeo’s slaughter of six family members in 1974. DeFeo told conflicting stories about the killings, at one point confessing to being the perpetrator—although he insisted that supernatural forces inhabiting the house made him do it. What Farrands has concocted from DeFeo’s outlandish defense is a familiar mass murder movie with supernatural overtones, in many respects a virtual remake of Amityville II: The Possession, the 1982 sequel that added an Exorcist-inspired subplot to the mix. That religious angle is jettisoned by Farrands, who simply records how Ronald DeFeo (Paul Ben-Victor), a thuggish man with mob connections, lorded it over his wife and their children so brutally that Butch (John Robinson) often retreated to a room where he, his sister, and their friends conjured up spirits that subsequently compelled Butch to commit the terrible crime. Despite amusing turns from Lainie Kazan and Burt Young as the kids’ grandparents, this ultra-cheap movie fails to add anything to a story that was handled far better by others in the past. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)