AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION
1982
Directed by Damiano Damiani
Written by Tommy Lee Wallace and Dardano Sacchetti (based on Murder In Amityville by Hans Holzer)
It's the case that basically every movie to bear the name Amityville—regardless of how closely it ties itself to the hoax perpetrated by the Lutzes following their January 1976 "escape" from their house at 112 Ocean Ave, Amityville, NY—is held to be at least slightly gauche, if not actively poisonous for society in general, both for validating bullshit superstitions as well as for taking the Lutzes' lead in exploiting the extremely real crimes upon which they'd based their haunting story in the first place, namely Ronald DeFeo Jr's November 1974 murder of his family. This prejudice isn't unfounded, though whether it's "more evil" or not, I could be convinced that using the name of Amityville to sell movies that don't even have the guts to be about the "true" events of 1974-76 is even more disgusting. But then there's Amityville II: The Possession, and, if nothing else, it's definitely got those guts. And it doesn't have any connection to the Lutzes' hoax—by definition, it shouldn't have any connection to the Lutzes at all. Yet it would be just about anybody's pick for the single gauchest film in the whole constellation of movies constituting the Amityville "franchise," for the simple reason that it goes for it: despite that number in the title, it's a prequel to The Amityville Horror, which is to say, this one's about the DeFeos.
Or... almost the DeFeos. And I'll take a counterintuitive tack here, and suggest that it's less evil than the first film: while it is, technically, based on putative "nonfiction," it doesn't stress that, and the movie doesn't have anybody in it actually named DeFeo, probably out of legal skittishness, but purposeful or not this immediately concedes that what you're watching is at least that much of a fiction, and likely more, especially once it moves beyond the not-DeFeo murders and untethers itself to any version of the real murder case; furthermore, it's manufactured in a way completely indifferent to even being perceived as an accurate account of the events of 1974, which is the case all over, but most forcefully with a demon that speaks to not-Ronnie Jr via a Sony fucking Walkman, first marketed in 1979, and that strikes me as more pointed than lazy. Much less dispositively, our screenwriter—a walkabout John Carpenter associate, Tommy Lee Wallace, now delivering his very first produced screenplay, with his directorial debut, Halloween III, not far behind (a certain Dardano Sacchetti, though uncredited, is also said to have been involved in some fashion)—has ensured that the number of not-DeFeos is six rather than seven, and as this streamlining has previously made me accidentally relay the fictionalization's headcount rather than the real one (an error since corrected), I guess that's "bad," albeit only in the most banal of ways. But Wallace's screenplay also seems to imply that some kind of event has already occurred, prior to its not-DeFeos' occupation of the property—they make a big deal about the windows being nailed shut, on top of how they've just moved in, rather than spending years in the house before the murders happened—which feels like we're spinning in a time loop.
What I can tell you is this: The Possession was directed by Damiano Damiani, an Italian of not a ton of repute, good or bad, in America—I believe this was the only English-language theatrical feature he made in his whole career—but whose reputation in Italy seems to be predominated by movies bearing what sounds like left-leaning social critique, from the very first Zapata Western, A Bullet For the General, to The Most Beautiful Wife, a true story (that is to say, the actual true story, so far as it goes) of the case that began the dismantling of the Italian "custom" of fuitina, i.e. bride kidnapping. (Also just a shit-ton of gangster movies, which happily doesn't inform this one, despite DeFeo Jr's intermittent return to explaining the murders as a mob hit related to what he asserted was his dad's relationship to the Mafia.) So it seems just possible to me that the distance that Damiani's putting between his movie and reality is, indeed, deliberate, even if what's known regarding Damiani's goals with The Possession was that he genuinely, purposefully wanted to upset people with its content above and beyond its exploitative associations. What I don't know is why this evidently well-regarded filmmaker suddenly decided in the early 80s, despite seemingly no horror experience whatever—not even gialli, somehow!—to make this sick geekshow of a film. Perhaps because everybody else was, and he didn't want to be left out. And just maybe—though don't quote me on this, because even the keyboard clacks sound asinine as I type it—engaging with something as inexplicably horrific as DeFeo Jr's murder of his kin as an act of "demonic possession," tantamount to a war between the Devil and God, made as much emotional or metaphorical sense to Damiani as anything else. Or he (or his boss) saw what I saw in The Amityville Horror, and a bald-faced knock-off of The motherfucking Exorcist made as much emotional or metaphorical sense to them as anything else. Well, we'll get there.
Meanwhile, outside the movie, its distributor, Orion Pictures, is said to have been legally compelled to promote The Possession with posters that overtly declared, "This film has no association with George and Kathy Lutz" (though this sure didn't come in time to take the Lutzes' names out of the trailer!), this being the result of a dispute between the Lutzes and American International Pictures/Filmways beginning circa 1980 about what direction their "franchise" was going to go. The Lutzes, naturally, had insisted on adapting John G. Jones's book The Amityville Horror II, to which they had contributed, but what the decisionmakers here (for at some point during AIP's dissolution inside Filmways' gullet, what happened was this sequel became an Italian-Mexican co-production headed by none other than Dino De Laurentiis) ultimately settled upon instead was Hans Holzer's sensationalized, supernatural report on the DeFeos, Murder In Amityville. Thus, the very first Amityville sequel was already the very first example of unscrupulous producers seizing upon the public domain attributes of the brand. If that fucked the Lutzes, good, even if I wouldn't necessarily have wished their subsequent bankruptcy upon them, and like the majority in the (temporarily) Lutz-favorable 1989 decision in the California Court of Appeals (who tentatively allowed the Lutzes to proceed in an action to protect their "business's" right to prevent unfair competition against its products, a concept that's essentially "trademark," but properly-speaking isn't*), I'm also myself a little hung up on that great big "II" in Amityville II: The Possession's title, which is something of a tell that De Laurentiis intended to steal the Lutzes' thunder, even if the dissent perhaps makes the better argument that the law shouldn't give a shit either way. Eventually, the Lutzes must've been determined, or must've otherwise come to accept, that they didn't even possess that much ownership of "Amityville," at least sans "horror."
Anyway, if I seem disposed to cut it more slack than The Amityville Horror, then of course the real reason is that I just like the movie itself more, which is how moral scolding usually goes, isn't it? But let none of the foregoing suggest that Amityville II: The Possession is not one incredibly crass and sleazy little thing. So: we begin with a family, the Montellis, moving into their new house, and as noted, they number six: father Anthony (Burt Young), mother Dolores (Rutanya Alda), littlest kids Jan and Mark (actual siblings Erika and Brent Katz, which absolutely shines through), elder daughter Patricia (Diane Franklin), and the eldest overall, Anthony Jr., invariably referred to as "Sonny" (Jack Magner); and you win no points for guessing to whom the presence in the house attaches itself. Even so, the first member of the family to see its signs is Dolores, who finds "blood" gushing from the pipes, which may legitimately just be rust, and she easily laughs it off, but she's also the one on-hand at the discovery of the secret room in the basement, and she's furthermore the first to be "touched" by the thing that's apparently always been here. Weird events keep occurring, though at present as much in parallel to the weirdness of the Montellis themselves, but you know how this eventually shakes out: over the coming weeks, Sonny is increasingly made thrall to a demon, and, while this might be a spoiler in other contexts, he murders his family on a dark and stormy night, leaving his family's priest Adamsky (James Olson) with the guilty realization that he's even more responsible for these five deaths than Sonny, because he'd played a conservative "wait and see" game with that demon, even though he'd experienced its depredations firsthand, and had a good idea of exactly what it was capable of.
We'll get back to that, but while The Possession has problems of its own, this is just such a signal improvement over The Amityville Horror. To begin with, though it's so far from being headlined by star players that the most recognizable person in the cast is John Cusack's dream girl from Better Off Dead, I think it'd be almost impossible not to call it top-to-bottom better-acted, which along with the better-defined family that's already on the page, means it overtakes the first film in terms of specific personality pretty much instantaneously; certainly by no later than the conclusion of the moving-in scene, where Magner and Franklin manage within about sixty seconds' worth of odd spins to already-odd lines—the immediate if probably not-that-helpful parallel I'd draw would be any given exchange between Jack and Janet on Three's Company but with Chrissy inflections—to establish their rather particular sibling relationship without necessarily completely giving the game away, thanks to just enough plausible deniability on the part of the actors that maybe they are just giving "bad" performances, and don't know exactly how to do repartee with an opposite-sex sibling of roughly the same age without coming off like they want to fuck. Though it's definitely not accidental, and it's going to give the movie the dizzy sensation of a demonic possession being a complication to brother-sister incest rather than its cause (I'm happy to imagine that the numerous cuts inflicted upon the film prior to release, pretty bafflingly considering that this relationship is its dramatic spine, is the reason it suffers the occasional mild discontinuity in this regard); but I presume you can further appreciate how incorporating the most boorishly sensationalist aspect of DeFeo legendry also sets a baseline for The Possession's complete renunciation of that thing you call "good taste," which surely isn't the worst thing horror can do. Either way, Magner is surprisingly strong throughout, starting out a troubled youth playing at detached cool and eventually succumbing to—and, accordingly, having to play, sometimes with some serious gearshifts—that nasty demonic entity that's been stalking him (and I'd daresay his physical resemblance to Ewan McGregor doesn't hurt a character constantly looking like he's trying to kick heroin). But I'm not down on any of the Montellis, really—the Katz siblings would be the next-best, directed cannily (that is to say, without anything really concerning involved) as a replication-in-miniature of their elder siblings, and one of the wooziest moments is Erika play-acting murdering her brother with a plastic bag with enough naturalism to fully straddle the boundary between "kids do some stupid shit" and "demonic influence"—though Young and Alda are by far the least-compelling, and it's taken a couple of watches before I've felt that Young's bellowing Abusive Archie Bunker actually fits here, mainly because Alda's making it clear enough that her middle-class pretensions are a quixotic struggle a blue-collar slobbiness she's realized she's never going to escape.
This is all done very efficiently, so that it's not even too much of an imposition that this 104 minute movie, that's still got something completely different to get to, decides to pounce on this family more-or-less immediately, and this is where Damiani comes in with a sensibility that doesn't seem to have been able to have trained in it, given his filmography, but sure has been trained by "Italian horror," in the best sense of that phrase. Now, one of the littler quibbles one might have with this "franchise" is that 112 Ocean Ave never looks the same—they still use the Toms River, NJ house for exteriors, but there's little apparent effort to even try to make it look like the first film's interiors (I mean, there's a damn double-doored anteroom at the entrance now, which is just some wild indifference to architectural continuity), but it's still a good set they built in Mexico City, and may in some respects look the closest to the real house, enough so on the second floor landing I'm surprised they didn't replicate the famous "ghost" photo from the Warrens' investigation of it.
Damiani's going to be using this set as an arena, showing off some terrific muscularity with a roaming camera that, as often as not, just is the entity stalking poor Sonny (which means Magner has a whole lot of screentime he has to fill with convincingly staring in confused terror at a camera doing loop-de-loops that shouldn't be possible in this space), but Damiani and DP Franco Di Giacomo (who did have giallo experience, including Four Flies On Grey Velvet) are applying movement to all of their interior scare scenes, getting so much out of the three-dimensionality of the house that they're casting the illusion that they actually are going up and down those stairs themselves—I was actually surprised on that second watch that they withhold a Raimiesque Steadicam shot, bolting up the stairs, for one of the very last shots of the movie—and choreographing their actors and props with much more precision than you'd likely imagine an avowed cash-in sequel would bother with.
So take what, as I recall, is their very first night in the house, this gorgeous mobile tableau of high-impact familial disintegration, with something like half the Montellis vowing to murder the other half, that's demonically-prompted (it kicks off with a wire-based invisible creature doing a tablecloth trick to cover an offending crucifix), but could've happened without a demon at all, and is only supernatural because of the electrical problems and swells of darkness and the swooping camera, the former giving editor Sam O'Steen some leave to stitch takes together, something he's managing without a great deal of preciousness and thus permitting the visible seams to make that escalating, seemingly already-unstoppable action all the more intense. Later on, Damiani and Di Giacomo will trot out some colored gels as the demon's power over Sonny waxes, because it's Argento but it's Bava too, and all along composer Lalo Schifrin (the sole factor replicated from Amityville Horror besides exterior photography) is being way louder. When the time comes, I don't imagine it ever occurred to Damiani to do the fate of his not-DeFeos like "real life." The Possession's massacre is a much more cinematic thriller sequence that, thanks to not being like the DeFeos' deaths, perhaps offers a little hope. That hope is apparently confirmed when it suggests it was all just a premonitory nightmare inside our erstwhile priest's head—which might be the cruelest trick the movie ever plays.
So I've been describing an excellent movie, and I too was wondering where The Possession's shitty reputation could've possibly come from, ready to chalk it up to just another instance of selective moral high-horsing, but then, I've also only described the first 60 or so minutes of this 104 minute film—which, to be fair, is another way it seems pretty damned impossible in the moment that the massacre could already be happening. So here's the thing: The Possession is up to one crazily ambitious structural gambit, and I'm not sure it's not all too much for the movie to bear, especially when the sole tool it has available to pursue that structural trick is just... doing The Exorcist, with some courtroom drama attached, but ultimately in some astoundingly identical ways.
The good news is it gets us to a place with some wonderfully grody effects work—that, admittedly, gets one-too-many glamor shots, but sure isn't sweating the plausible physical recovery of the possession victim. So I don't even want to say it's a terrible rip-off of The Exorcist, which is on top of its immense value as "literally anything filling another 40 minutes" in order to give those first 60 minutes the ability to climax so quickly that a despicable exploitation film we already know the ending of earns its power to upset us anyway. But it's also much less visually-distinctive once we leave the property; Damiani's not even giving up or anything (there's a lovely symbolic use of a cross-shaped shadow between Adamsky and Sonny in the latter's jail cell), but he obviously can't recapture the same energy now. It's also just less, for lack of a better word, fun: Adamsky's guilt-ridden crusade to save Sonny's soul, played just fine by Olson (until he has to almost literally start quoting The Exorcist, anyway), is still just less interesting than the perilous dance Magner and Franklin were up to, and when in extremis they find a way into something interesting with Adamsky (fittingly enough, by bringing Franklin back into the picture), it feels truncated, or even like they didn't dare, which is weird thing to accuse this movie of. It's just so difficult to evaluate a film when everything it accomplishes—which is a considerable amount!—it accomplishes only because its third act kind of sucks.
Score: 7/10
*This is, it occurs to me, likely the more technically-correct explanation for why New Line was so circumspect about using "Friday the 13th," but this isn't a law blog, is it?
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