E-Mail This Article to a Friend THE AMITYVILLE HORROR

Thanks to director Andrew Douglas’s stylistic razzle-dazzle, this remake of the 1979 schlock horror film (which looked cheesy and cheap even for its time) is an upgrade in the creeps department. That’s not to say the story is any more plausible. Purported to be based in fact, it revolves around a Long Island manse with a "vibrant history" (as an over-zealous real-estate agent puts it) that amounts to the mass murder of six people in 1974. A year later, the Lutz family move in thinking they’ve realized the American Dream. Then the haunted house signs on. Ghastly incantations whisper through the heating ducts, gruesome apparitions crop up, and blood flows from the walls.

As George Lutz, a super-buff Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder) is the image of James Brolin and nails the descent into homicidal madness with aplomb. (Think Jack Nicholson in The Shining.) An equally comely Melissa George is effective as George’s wife, Kathy, with three children from a previous marriage. Douglas extracts great tension from the two, especially as George unravels and Kathy switches from caring spouse to protective mother. The ridiculous pig with the glowing eyes may be gone, but the inane expansion illuminating the origins of evil will have you screaming bloody murder. (100 minutes)