Like a cancer in the system.
(Written for the Final Girl Film Club.)
It’s kind of embarrassing how hard Amityville II: The Possession rips off The Exorcist - not because it displays a paucity of imagination but because the film is way more interesting when the devil isn’t in the details. Until the third act, the possession angle is a smokescreen, a safe way to smuggle in some disconcerting stuff about paternal abuse and familial rot. Demons, motivated by the old Indian burial ground desecration trope, get into young Sonny Montelli’s brain and make him do horrid stuff, sure, but that’s not until a good half hour into the film, by which point it’s already been demonstrated that the Montelli family is irreparably fucked-up. The tumor that’s rapidly metastasizing inside the family body is patriarch Anthony, played with sweaty surliness by Burt Young; from his introduction in the very first scene, he’s a brutish tyrant, apt to communicate more with a shout and a slap than with any manner of reasoned discussion if any other family member should deign to challenge his authority. His physical abusiveness is a clear parallel to Sonny’s demonically-influenced sexual abuse of his nubile sister Patricia; additionally, the demon itself is clearly coded as a metaphor for sexual abuse in the scene where it invades Sonny, and the lack of marital relations between Anthony and his long-suffering wife Dolores make me wonder if there isn’t supposed to an intimation of sexual abusiveness on Anthony’s part as well.
This is the kind of family unit where arguments are settled with shotguns, and that’s before Satan sticks his neck out, so one wonders why the supernatural nonsense needed to be there at all aside from bankability. I guess the idea is to drag James Olson’s tortured Father Adamsky into the mix, and while he gives his best Jason Miller impression, he can’t save the hackneyed goofiness into which he finds himself thrust. Olson is on the receiving end of much of the dumbest bits of the film - the blood sprinkler springs to mind, as does the immortally silly bit where a defense lawyer gives him shit for suggesting, “The Devil made him do it,” as a proper defense. When the exorcism plot goes full throttle, the film teeters over into the realm of the unintentionally funny, with Olson’s histrionics during the climactic confrontation provides mucho laughs. Yet even there, there’s a glimmer of the film this secretly wanted to be: as the demon inside Sonny is trying to break Adamsky’s will, he incarnates into the form of Patricia, playing on Adamsky’s angst over her death, which he might have been able to prevent had he taken more stock in her veiled claims of sexual malfeasance. Underneath the blood and the ooze and the tortured Catholicism and the (admittedly impressive) prosthetic makeup effects, there’s a story here about a nuclear family that’s free-falling into tragedy and the crushing guilt felt by a good man who could have prevented it yet did nothing.
Also: This was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, and it’s amusing to note echoes, unintentional or otherwise, in two notable films that later showed up under his banner - the diseased, sexually perverse secret lives of bland suburbanites is a theme that would later be brought to its perfect expression by David Lynch in Blue Velvet, and the swooping, menacing tracking shots that chase Sonny around the Amityville house during the possession scene bear an uncanny similarity to a similar sequence in Raimi’s Evil Dead II. (Of course, Raimi was merely ramping up something that he’d already started with the first film in his wildly entertaining series, but that’s a different discussion.) Also, Andrew Prine is here as a priestly friend of Adamsky, and he’s given absolutely zero to do. Which, if you’ve ever seen Prine in action, is just a fuckin’ shame.
