I had a trout Beanie Baby named Rainbow. The prize jewell of my collection is now gone with the rest. All sold on eBay by the Goose Lord and his gang. I’m sorry. I can’t process the loss right now. Maybe I’ll work up the strength next time.

— To be continued. 

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Happy Halloween, everybody! Tonight’s movie is 1979’s The Amityville Horror from director Stuart Rosenberg and starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder as George and Kathy Lutz.

What can I say? This is the big one. The most famous haunted house in American history, adapted from the 1977 bestselling so-called nonfiction book about the unnatural events that occurred in that Dutch Colonial in Long Island, New York. I used to catch this on Saturday afternoons with commercials and I thought it was the real deal, but when I read the book, I found the whole thing a bit hard to swallow.

Upon rewatching this movie for the 50th time I’ve gained some insights. 

People hated children in the 1970s. 

I don’t know what it is about movies from the 1970s and the portrayal of children, but even I want to smack these little shits around. So the Lutz family has three children. The worst of these is Amy who rambles on about her imaginary friend Jody. Amy is a brat who keeps singing her Bible songs to the benefit of her ghostly friend. When her brace-faced babysitter goes into the closet to retrieve a sweater or a jacket or some slippers—I don’t remember—the babysitter gets locked inside and Amy won’t lift a finger to get her out. And you see the babysitter’s hands getting all bloody as she screams to be let out. Amy doesn’t care because she’s just evil which is why the demonic spirits like her.

Rod Steiger shouts too much. 

I know he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, but that award should have been rescinded for his portrayal of Father Delaney. When he’s not stumbling around because of psionic attacks from demonic forces, he rants and raves. One scene has him screaming at church officials because they’re not taking his demonic infestation story seriously. And then they start screaming back at him and he shrivels up like a prune. When Father Delaney screams at heaven, he gets blinded for his efforts. Father Delaney spends the rest of the movie in a quasi catatonic state.

I guess that’s his character arc. 

Ghosts like fat stacks. 

Kathy Lutz’s cousin is getting married. The guy is a wiener with a bad perm, but we won’t hold that against him. He tucks $1,500 inside his suit jacket pocket to pay the caterer, but then it just disappears into thin air. George agrees to pay the caterer assuming the money will turn up later, but it never does. Why did the ghosts steal the money? I don’t know. Maybe there are roulette tables in hell and Jody wanted to bet it all on black. 

Psychic girlfriends can sniff out gateways to hell. 

We learned in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond that there are seven cursed gateways in seven cursed places and the Amityville house is one of these such gateways. We know this because Mr. Lutz’s business partner has a psychic girlfriend who starts busting open a wall in the basement of the house only to find a red room that’s the passage to hell. She screams “Cover it!” in some distorted voice that sounds nothing like her and the whole is kind of freaky. Thankfully, we don’t see her again for the rest of the picture.

It’s fun to see James Brolin get covered in black goo. 

After the family drives away from the house in the final moments, George Lutz decides to go back for the dog they left behind. Nobody wants to see poor Harry succumb to the demonic forces. But when poor George tries to rescue the dog, he falls through two floors into a pit of black goo in the basement.

I would have ended the movie there with James Brolin downing in black goo.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, and episode 644) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.