Rish Outfield's reviews
Not as scary or as good as it was fabled to be, but not as bad as many of its imitators. This was one of those "true story" horror films I was told to stay away from as a boy (see also The Exorcist and The Entity). Well, there were some creepy moments and some genuine scares, but the rest was easily shrug-off-able. Margot Kidder was good, as was James Brolin, although I never really believed him. The little scene with the psychic woman drove me nuts--what a sappy, stupid, unnecessary sequence! You know, the biggest problem I had with this movie was that nothing seemed to happen for a reason, and often for no purpose other than to 'scare' the audience. Was there any danger? What was the real threat? Help me out here. And, the ending... I was left very unsatisfied. Weren't you?
Best Scare: That sick scene with the flies and the priest. . . eww.
I'd Recommend It To: Die hard haunted house fans.
Note: Look, I didn't enjoy this film. The copy we watched was compacted rather than Pan & Scanned, and I had a splitting headache a half-hour through. We even tried a second copy and found it the same way. I cannot recommend a compacted version of any film, let alone this one.
Note 2: The best thing about "Amityville" was the idea it gave me for a haunted house story of my own.

The tyranist's thoughts
I don't know how it happened, but this movie has achieved a "classic" label. It isn't even good enough to warrant repeat viewings, let alone 36 sequels (OK 7). My biggest problem with this one was simply that they tried to be too true to the book. They could have easily altered some of what they saw as the truth and made a great movie. Instead they made a movie that simply lacks punch. In this case the truth is more boring than fiction.
On the other hand it may be that a good haunted house movie is really hard to make. Nine out of ten haunted house movies are really ghost stories that are connected to one location. These aren't extremely difficult (witness Haunted based on the James Herbert novel of the same name). This is because they rely more on the ghost than making the house itself evil. A truly evil house is so far out of most of our experiences that to make it convincing is nearly impossible. In addition to that the majority of evil house stories rely on a history that sounds so contrived that no one in their right mind would live there. Keeping that in mind The Amityville Horror isn't a bad example of this particular subgenre. But it is still remarkably slow and lacks some of the flair that a rewrite could have contributed.