REVIEWED - THE AMITYVILLE HORROR: George Lutz, who made a fortune telling the story of his family's alleged haunting at a time when, thanks to The Exorcist, such yarns were highly saleable, has publicly taken issue with this second cinematic representation of his adventures, writes Donald Clarke

Mr Lutz implies that director Andrew Douglas and producer Michael Bay have merely glanced at the events of the 1974 bewitchment - walls dripped blood and foul effluent flowed about a house built on an Indian burial ground - and sensationalised the tale for cheap, tawdry thrills. What can they have been thinking?

As it happens, this propulsive, uncluttered version of The Amityville Horror is rather better than the clunky 1979 incarnation. Like the recent remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (also produced by the dread Mr Bay) the film takes place in the 1970s as envisioned by Gap and The Thrills.

Wearing hip, boot cut jeans - but neither velvet loons, nor Scholl sandals - a young, married couple (Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George) move into a huge house with windows like eyes. Before long, the leaky haematic plumbing and the scary stary child ghosts have Mr Reynolds, whose relationship with the children of his wife's first marriage is already shaky, reaching for the hatchet and the shotgun.

Blending traditional haunted house scares with more earthly thrills - a scene on the rooftops of the house is particularly good - the picture progresses nippily through its economic 89 minutes towards a slightly disappointing denouement featuring the usual running around and shouting.

Then again, as this is a true story (in a pig's eye), we always knew the ghosts were unlikely to loose Armageddon on the planet.