[The Amityville Horror] begins with the promising premise of a haunted house in the suburbs (poltergeists in the barbecue pit?) and quickly degenerates into a display of pretentious camera angles.

The Amityville Horror is a horror. What is supposed to be the true story of a young couple driven from their dream house by demons turns out to be nothing more than a rip-off, and a tedious one at that.

Its pacing is off, there are too many go-nowhere subplots, & it seems just to come to a clunking halt at the end [but] the film's lack of commitment to any single reading of its narrative architecture is precisely what makes it so uncanny.

Ignore the silly attempts at faking a true story, and Amityville is an effective and oftentimes scary haunted house thriller.