Current mood:	blah
Entry tags:	movies, music

Schifrin’s Amityville Frenzy!
I could go on and complain more about the upcoming re-make of The Amityville Horror—“Based on a True Hoax!” should be the tag line, thank you very much—because I’m starting to see the damn billboards everywhere. But I would like to say something positive about the first movie, the 1979 version directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring James “Why the Hell Did I Marry Barbara Streisand?” Brolin and Margot “Already Going Downhill from Superman” Kidder. I’ve mentioned before that, hoax problem aisde, this is a plain and simple awful horror movie. Dull, meandering, seemingly going nowhere as one day after another unspools before us (with a helpful counter telling us how many more days of nothing happening we have to endure). The best scenes have Rod Steiger chewing the scenery so shamelessly that you can hear the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lurking in the wings to try to grab the Oscar they gave him. Honestly, nothing happens in this film. The family just hangs around the house, enduring odd things (like petty theft…oooooh, scary) until they leave. That’s it, really! No dramatic structure at all. I’m sure anyone who watched the film who was aware of the controversy over the story’s validity (no controversy now, it’s pretty much settled) would have immediately decided the story was a bunch of hokum. Nothing in the film feels real or remotely intriguing…so how could this be a true story? (Interestingly, the first movie does not include this claim…the filmmakers probably knew better.)

But…I did say I liked something about the film, didn’t I? Yes, I like Lalo Schifrin’s score. Schifrin, a film composer of Argentine background, has composed some terrific scores in his time. I especially love his work on the crime thrillers Bullit and Dirty Harry and his Academy Award nominated music for the Voyage of the Damned. Schifrin wrote a creepy two-note-based lullaby for the Amityville Horror, and it’s darned freaky. (La-la, La-la…) It doesn’t have the same effect as the lullaby Goldsmith wrote for Poltergeist, but it still has a spine-chilling jolt to it. Amazingly, Schifrin managed to make an effective score based on that simple two-note motif. The score is filled with chaotic dissonance and scratchy noises that have a genuinely oppressive feeling—in fact, it’s too much for the film, which pretty much has no scares at all. The music seems to be off doing it’s own thing, scoring an apparently much more interesting film.

I just got a copy of the 2002 album of Schifrin’s re-recording of the score, which includes all of the film’s music. The original album only contained part of Schifrin’s score, with the rest of time eaten up by an hysterical disco version of the main theme called “Amityville Frenzy!” It has to be heard to be believed, but I’m glad the new album ditches this bit of ‘70s kitsch culture. (Almost every late-70s movie soundtrack featured a disco version of the main theme.)