Director: Damiano Damiani
Writers: Tommy Lee Wallace, Hans Holzer
Stars: James Olson, Burt Young, Rutanya Alda
Run Time: 1 Hour, 44 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2XalRcU
Synopsis
A new family moves into the Amityville house. The mother goes into the kitchen, and blood comes out of the water tap within minutes. All the windows are all nailed shut. They find a hidden room with broken sewer line; it’s dripping water, stinks, and is full of flies.
That night, we get a point-of-view shot of something coming out of the secret room and wandering the house. There’s a knocking at the front door, but no one is there. Other strange things start happening. The father blames the smallest children and pulls out the belt and beats up the mother. The oldest son points a shotgun at the father, and things calm down quickly.
The local priest comes over to bless the house and all Hell breaks loose once again. Also again, the father starts beating on the little ones. The oldest boy, Sonny, finds something nasty in the secret room in the basement. There’s lots of screaming and looks of pain, but not much happens. Guns fire, sparks fly, the furnace acts up, steam hisses, but nothing really happens.
Sonny and his sister Patricia do the whole incest thing. The priest returns for a second attempt at blessing the house but that goes worse than the first try with blood splashing everywhere.
Sonny’s birthday party comes, he hears voices saying the family would be better off if he killed them. The mother starts catching on to a hint of the incest between her oldest children, but she’s got her own problems when the father rapes her while the daughter listens in.
Possessed by a demon that makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster, Sonny grabs a shotgun and chases down family members throughout the house, one by one, killing them. No, wait— He didn’t, it was all a dream that the priest had. The priest rushes over to find the police hauling out bodies. It wasn’t really a dream after all. Sonny doesn’t remember any of it.
The priest visits Sonny in jail, and he wants to expose the demon. The priest wants the police to let Sonny go so that he can exorcise the demon in the church; it just won’t work in the jail cell. The police refuse. The priest does some research, and finds out that the house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.
The detective gives the priest a key to the cell, his gun, and tells the priest to knock him out and escape. That goes badly, and Sonny and the priest end up at the Amityville house, in the basement. Things soon devolve into an exorcism ritual, and Sonny is freed, which I’m sure the police will accept with no issues at all. The priest, on the other hand, is now possessed…
Commentary
There was actually an Amityville II book, but this is based on a different book, which was loosely based on the DeFeo story that we’ve seen before. “The Amityville Murders” from 2018 told the story much better and was far more entertaining.
This whole family is awfully touchy-feely, and I suspect the incest would have happened regardless of the evil house. Are “normal” families that “huggy” and “touchy?” I suspect not. The ghosts and demons are the least of this family’s problems. If anything, the murders may have ended their ongoing suffering.
The last third of the movie, with the police, lawyers, and the trial are boring, unrealistic, and contrived. The exorcism is pretty much like every other exorcism you’ve ever seen, with nothing new here.