I don’t want to spoil the surprises for anyone. I’m kidding; I very much want to spoil them for any jackass who is delighted by surprises as shitty as this movie’s. I would also love to have you in my family, because Christmas gift-giving would be cheap. I could wrap up some goat balls and vials of urine and you’d be thrilled.
Fattening this skeletal story like so many Ding Dongs in Ashley’s belly before she purges are dozens of silly, distracting SNL-type skits. I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean that the way SNL skits are: really fucking shitty, bloated, pointless, and hoping for a graceful and swift death but usually living too long, like my Aunt Horis and making us all pay.
Overall, The Amityville Horror is an unimaginative bore. Sure, the acting is terrible, with Reynolds showing us his boogers instead of emoting, and George mostly screeching and yowling like a cat with its tail caught in a woodchipper (she has dazzling breasts, though, and nice sweaters). But what lowers this thing into the crapper is how lame and contrived the scares are.
Maybe there is a lesson to learn from the eighties about greed, but not for me since I was too fucking busy getting my G.E.D. and learning about carburetors at technical school. I have no interest reliving, in detail, the lives of rich fucks from long ago.
If I were still a stupid teenager all hopped on model glue, American Pie would be the only movie I’d need. It would be my everything, my Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Star Wars and Sorority Sluts all rolled into one.
What makes American Movie work are the scenes of average guys, like us, living in our dirty houses, driving beat up old piece of shit cars, dealing with nasty toenails, working crappy jobs, and also pursuing our dreams.
As an audience, we’re turned around. I went into American Beauty expecting the same-old satire of suburban life, nailing the same old targets. I expected the Hollywood goat-cheese-eaters to say that people in the suburbs are boring, conservative and only care about property values, because Hollywood loves saying they’re better than the rest of us.
All of the actors who passed on the script for Alone in the Dark smelled this heap of shit while it was still in the mail truck down the street. But Slater, Reid and Dorff either didn’t smell it or thought it had the pleasing odor of their own farts.
Almost Famous is brilliant moviemaking for all the people in their forties who bitch about today’s music and still listen to their shitty Pink Floyd records. It’s great nostalgic cinema for a time when rock and roll was at is worst and its fans were at their most moronic.
I love movies about average people, but what I love is for the characters to be “average” and not genuinely as dull and lame as the real average. I want them to subtly exceed the boundaries of the mundane and serve as inspiration, amusement or a lesson to the rest of us living in dingy apartments near railroad tracks.
