There should have been more lingering shots of the house, more menace from the walls. The original version of Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting" is a great example of this. Kubrick's "The Shining" is another.

Maybe this movie is just too slick for its own good. It wants to scare the pants off of you. It does have a few minor moments of creepiness. Somehow they usually get flattened by bloody special effects or torrents of rain.

The most frightening moments are the semi-normal ones. The wood chopping scene with Reynolds playing George Lutz as a slightly disturbed daddy is effective. The babysitter's scene is one of the best in the whole movie. Too bad it feels rushed.

The fact that the film is over in less than ninety minutes attests to the fact that there isn't enough time to really delve into the psychological side of Amityville, something that Hitchcock would have exploited for maximum effect. I have a sneaking suspicion that there was much cut out of this movie either for being too gory or simply because the people who made it didn't really know what they were doing. If James Brolin were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave.

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