tornado-10

Beaks is one of those rare movies, like Troll 2, that is so badly done, and silly, that it's fun to watch. Beaks is an obvious, and badly done, take on Alfred Hitchcocks' The Birds, but unlike the aforementioned film, contains little in the way of terror and absolutely no suspense what so ever.

Horror films often do not get their do, and the 7.1 rating for Poltergeist shows that this trend will most likely continue. Clearly an influential film by Chainsaw director Tobe Hooper, Poltergeist reached for, and achieved, everything that the earlier Amityville Horror failed to be; namely, scary, credible, and well acted.

Poltergeist, in a nutshell, is a story of suburban California family that discovers the darker side of the American Dream when their youngest daughter, Carol Ann, makes contact with evil spirits through the family television set. "They're here", never fails to send chills down my spine as I recall seeing this film for the first time as a teenager.

Perhaps 10 to 15 more years will finally lend the credibility to this film to finally place it among the classics in modern horror cinema.

In retrospect, the Amityville Horror is not deserving of its notoriety, nor of the influence this film has exerted on the horror film genre. Though this film utterly terrified me as a 10 year old child when I first saw this film, I rented this film recently and was forced to fight off the nods rather than the chills. I could not have suspended my disbelief on wires while watching this film about a man who bought a house he could not afford, had a wife he could not live with, and a family he barely had the patience to tolerate. George Lutz was a man looking to blame someone or something for his own personal problems, and the house proved to be a convenient and timely target.

The plot, as it stands, is that the murder of the DeFeo family (a very real tragedy) sparked a confrontation with the devil, an Indian burial ground, and the ghosts of the recently deceased family and 21 days or so after moving in, depending on which of the different accounts given by the Lutzes, they ran screaming from the house in the middle of the night terrified out of their minds. It is an eerie coincidence that the mortgage payment was due; unfortunately, a marginally self-employed George Lutz was just a few pesos short on making the payment.

For nostalgias sake, I really, really, wanted the Amityville Horror to be better than what it actually was.