Bumping Along

By R.S.

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Screenplay by Sandor Stem

This is a highly melodramatized version of Novelist Jay Anson's allegedly factual bestseller about a nice normal family who moved into a haunted house on Long Island and then found themselves psychologically terrorized by things that go bump in the night. It has become one of the summer's top grossing movies despite the fact that the people who made it seem to have been of two minds about their story. On the one hand, they are tediously documentary about every odd manifestation of the unseen world at work, and the accretion of these minor incidents is so dully presented that we begin to long for a good scare. On the other hand, when the film makers try to assuage our restlessness, they swing too far in the other direction. James Brolin, as the father on the verge of being devilishly possessed, does so much eye rolling that in the movie's sober context, he appears ludicrous. The absurdity is heightened by Rod Steiger, in one of his overripe performances as the family priest. who first suspects that something's rotten in Amityville.

The result is not chills, but an uncontrollable desire to break into laughter, so lacking is the film in properly gothic suspense. Margot Kidder is chipper and pleasant as the puzzled wife resisting her worst suspicions about the demons in her dream house, but she cannot overcome the film's ineptitude and lethargy. The movie's creators should either have stuck to the facts, ma'am, or they should have invented something to scare the pants off us. As it is, they have managed merely to bore them off. --R.S.

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