The Amityville Weight Set

The remake of the Amityville Horror is now out on DVD. If I remember correctly, the original Amityville Horror movie wasn't such a blockbuster and it's a true puzzlement that anyone would take a second shot at it. Thumby movie critics, Ebert and Roeper, were unable to review it because the movie company didn't want the critics to see it. So, that's not a good sign. My amazing connection to this movie was that I bought a set of weights from a guy from Amityville.

Yes. It's incredible and hard to believe, but here's how it happened. It was at an airforce base in Greece where I read the entire book, The Amityville Horror. I never actually bought the book, but just read the whole thing standing in the aisles. This bookstore was a fair-sized one which was run by Greeks who had what I think is the most unique way of organizing I've ever seen.

Let me ask you - say you were going to open a bookstore - how do you think you might organize the books? Subject matter, maybe. Or perhaps alphabetical by author? Or publisher or even the color of the cover? You'd do it in some logical way, wouldn't you? Not them. They organized the books by price. (no, no, I'm not kidding). Is that the dumbest thing you've ever heard of? Have you ever said to yourself that you want to read a twenty five dollar book, for example? Anyways, the Greeks there didn't like me too much because I was pretty insistent that they find a different method of inventory. Which, 0f course, they never did.

The book was written in the form of a daily diary and I had to wonder who on Earth goes to the trouble of starting and maintaining a daily diary about their friggin' house? Do you have friends or family who've ever done that? It's pretty abnormal, I think. The story was that this family moved into this house and all sorts offrightening paranormal activities started happening. Then they find out that a gruesome mass murder had been committed there before they'dbought it and it was haunted like you wouldn't believe. I forget how I met this guy from Amityville who I bought the weights from, but I did ask him about this and he said that he hadn't known the family who wrote the book, but knew the family who were murdered and the guy who murdered them, whom he described as a pretty normal fellow who he would see down at the local bar.

Later I saw a special on the Amityville Horror on PBS. (I don't know why I was watching PBS and I also don't know why they would do a show on this). On the show, they interviewed the people who had bought the house after the Amityville Horrors and found the house not to be the least bit haunted at all. The wife had, in fact, gone to the trouble of looking up the daily weather reports that matched the dates in the book and not one matched. That pretty much cinched it for me that the house was never haunted.

Those weights I bought from that Amityville guy, however - they were.