Amityville II: The Possession

Weird movie. You get one great scene involving a dinner table sheet, and then you get the French girl from "Better Off Dead" making love to, you guessed it, her brother. Weird movie.

Better than expected. Despite its many flaws, the makeup and camerawork are both good enough to warrant a watch or two.

"That house wants to fuck that boy"

While it's actually better than the original in some ways- the effects & the pacing being the big two- it's dramatically worse in others. The performances aren't terrible, but they aren't great either, & the super flat & boring characters this time around don't help. The abusive father felt like a caricature out of a comic. The house itself is less menacing, the incest subplot felt pointless, tacky & tasteless, & the third act was a drag. Overall this isn't all bad, but it's just not very good.

Spend your special effects budget on 10 gallons of regular gasoline and a Wendy's double bacon cheeseburger? No problem! Make your movie about a crack house haunted by a first-person camera! What Amityville II taught me about life: lawyers are pimps & stealing panties from your sister is more perverted than telling her to sit on your bed and take off her clothes.

Like the underrated HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II, both the best of its lame series and the one least like a conventional horror film. A deliberately revolting portrait of an abusive family, the malformed feelings that can engender fully brought out by The House, presented in a series of elaborate 'audience-implicating' steadicam shots, perhaps a bit obnoxious, but Damiani & co. are not content to simply ape THE SHINING, and try something. Aided by some effective body horror and make-up fx.

It actually gets a few things right in terms of atmosphere and nastiness, some of which seems rooted in the dynamic of the family itself. It wasn't clear to what extent that was down to the house or was present already. There is some unsettling incest action, then we get into full-blown Poltergeist/Exorcist/Shining territory, ideas seemingly being picked at random from those three. Things grind to a halt with a court scene, and an exorcism-based coda feels a bit tacked on. Quite a weird film.

Enjoyable in a lot of bad ways. Some good ones too, but this one really hits its stride with hysterics.

Slightly sits above the original in terms of entertainment value, mostly because of Burt Young yelling at and slapping the shit out of his family (all of whom are supposed to be Italian-American but are decidedly white bread). Then halfway through you can kind of tell Dino De Laurentiis stepped in and made the director rip off The Exorcist down to the color of the contacts of the possessed person. A wild, flailing mess that is still the best film in possibly the worst horror franchise there is.

I'm probably going out on a limb here (and sawing it off) by saying that this is the best of the Amityvilles. Laughably anxiety-ridden acting but there are some good makeup FX and flamboyant camera work guaranteed to give you whiplash.

"Take off your nightgown". Wow, that house has rather perverse ghosts dwelling there. I mean, the boy plows his sister! It's stupid on a normal basis, but pretty damn entertaining when you're drunk with friends. ^_^

Amazingly, this film gave me a waking nightmare. The overall atmosphere is really dark, menacing, and uncomfortable to watch. The feeling of evil incarnate is found in this film, which is a great contrast to the original, which had some issues finding scary moments overall.

Better than it should be.

This was a cheesy and over-the-top good time even if the film and acting weren't really all that good.

In addition to the demonic-possession angle, there's a teenager who sleeps with his sister and shotguns his entire family. Yet this movie still manages to be as boring as the day is long. An astonishing cinematic achievement -- just the wrong kind

It's not especially good, but it is extremely weird and that has to count for something.

I had this on VHS when I was little. Past tense.

"A depressing imitation of The Exorcist." - Nick Schager

1st film was a slow burn while this goes all-in and throws all the cliches of the genre in the mix. Director Damiani is known for political thrillers and was an odd choice, but he handles the duties well and crafts a few strong scenes. Script is bizarre and contains domestic violence and yucky sibling relations that can be seen as undercurrent for the events; main plot finishes well before the end and the film turns into Exorcist on steroids. Not a good film, but more entertaining than the 1st.