Amityville II: The Possession If Amityville II: The Possession the true story of Ronald DeFeo Jr., the drug-dependent mass-murderer, then Stephen King's It is the true story of Ronald McDonald – the sewer-dwelling, child-gobbling killer clown. Amityville II wants to be a haunted-house movie, an exorcism drama, and a dysfunctional- family sitcom all at the same time. This is what happens when a human centipede makes a movie: a scriptwriter shits out The Shinning, which is then digested by a director and dumped out as The Evil Dead, which in turn is eaten by an exceutive producer who has an explosive episode of Everyone Loves Raymond dysentery. I might as well introduce the family first. A demon in a haunted-house movie must have a family to kill, and the demon Amityville II could not have prayed for a better one. The Montelli family are not a sympathetic bunch and they let me know it swiftly. Any affection for them in the first act will be regretted as folly in the second. Mr. and Mrs. Montelli fight as if they were two cats with their tails tied together and thrown off a clothesline. Sonny and Trish, the oldest siblings, have an incestuous love affair that makes Flowers in the Attic seem as if it was Family Ties. Why the younger kids, Mark and Jan, are even in the damn movie at all is an unsolved mystery. When the family moves into the house, Mrs. Montelli is in the basement where she tells a mover to put a large crate “over there by the guns”. A POV shot comes out of the cellar and ruffles her dress. Then Sonny comes downstairs, and she looks at him with the wall-eyed stare of a Hooter's Owl from Hell. She insists that “Someone – touched me.”, and by the look of her face I know that Mr. Montelli has not touched her for a logn time and this is why she is downstairs supervising the storage of his guns. Later that night the demon comes out of the cellar again. It sees a crucifix and hisses at it. I don't see why it was offended: Jesus will be on that cross for much longer than three days. Then it knocks on the front door and disappears. Mr. Montelli grabs a shotgun, shouts some belligerent bullshit on the porch, then goes inside without firing a warning shot. I'm glad he didn't. I want every gun in that house fully-loaded at all times – a bullet for every vital organ in the house. The demon caps off its pranks by painting a picture in Mark and Jan's room of a wolf with bloody teeth on the wall along with an aphorism: “Dishonor thy father and mother. PIGS”. Mr. and Mrs. Montelli have a fight as Mr. Montelli wallops the kids and blackly dashes whatever painting aspirations they might have had. The whipping isn't excessive; they just moved into the house: not even the Manson family would paint pig-themed graffiti in a house before killing some people in it first. Sonny comes downstairs, finds the shotgun, grabs it, and places the barrel on Mr. Montelli's face – but then Mrs. Montelli takes it away. The demon is upset that Sonny didn't kill Mr. Montelli and asks him “Why didn't you pull the trigger?” through his Walkman headphones. Sonny looks at each ear piece to make sure the demon is speaking stereo. I demand an answer from Sonny as well even if the demon and myself have a different goal. The demon might suggest that Sonny kill his father in self-defense; but the demon never suggests anything. By simply asking rhetorical questions through headphones the demon will only give Sonny grave doubts about his sanity, which will make him more unlikely to pull the trigger in the future. The demon and I do not have the same goal. After the rumpus with the gun, Mrs. Montelli has an itch to have the house blessed and invites a priest, Father Adamsky, over to bless it. The demon has a hissy fit: food flies out of the refrigerator and dishes fly across the kitchen. Mark and Jan are in the kitchen when this mess occurs, and Father Adamsky has to stop Mr. Montelli from beating them again. Mrs. Montelli threatens to leave the house without the possibility of return unless Mr. Montelli apologizes to Father Adamsky. Mr. Montelli gives in, and later that night everyone but Sonny goes to church. Before they leave, Trish calls Sonny “Snotty” when he doesn't join them. She probably calls him this because of the used-tissue paper that accumulates in any room Sonny occupies. While Sonny is home alone the demon throws a suitcase at him as if it wants him to pack his shit and leave. Sonny arms himself with a scoped long rifle so he can fire at the invisible demon from a great distance. Then Sonny does some strange things. He investigates the cellar, then flees when the steam pipes burst. There are many long shots of him staring into the camera with horror. Then he will seemingly forget whatever he's seeing, mosey around with the gun until he notices the demon again, stare at it, forget it – rinse and repeat. He does this routine all the way up the stairs, down the hall, back up the stairs, and then in the stairwell. Every time he sees the camera he freezes with terror, then calms down, cocks the gun, and goes about his business of searching for whatever it is he was staring at. He goes in his bedroom and fires the gun a few times. Then the demon tries to take his gun away; he struggles a but gives in quickly. The demon has been invisible all this time; I want to know if it is invisible to Sonny. If Sonny saw the demon, why did he stay in the house and act at intervals as if he hadn't seen it? If he hasn't seen it, why does he surrender the gun so easily over to thin air that, if there is no demon in it, has been the only thing stalking him? Then the demon posses Sonny and briefly deforms him by bulging his neck and the back of his head as it looks for a good place to nest. If comfort is such a priority I don't see why the demon didn't posses the much more comfortable interior of Trish instead. The scene climaxes with the demon shaking the house, firing guns, spinning beds, and blowing the fuse box. Next scene the family returns from church. Considering what just happened they might as well head right back. The demon also might as well slaughter them all while they are temporarily getting along and feeling rosy about going to heaven. Mr. Montelli's apology to Father Adamsky has now become a thoroughly tangential topic, but the movie insists on reminding me about it in case I might suspect that Mr. Montelli is a sincerely church-going man. Sonny visits Trish in her bedroom and she tells him that Mr. Montelli apologized, then mentions that Mr. Montelli tired to get Mrs. Montelli drunk and failed. She concludes that they aren't having sex anymore. Sonny then asks Trish to strike a pose for him on the bed, which she does under the pretense that he will pretend to be a photographer. A photographer whose assignment, however, becomes increasingly disturbing no matter what magazine Trish initially fantasized that he worked for. A photographer for a teen magazine might ask his sister, “the most beautiful girl in the world”, to make a cute face while he took pictures for an article about her pop song; a photographer for a lingerie magazine might ask his sister to seductively smile and wink on her bed: but only a photographer for Incest Digest would ask his sister to take off her nightgown and pose with her hair up as he stares at her naked breasts. If blood is thicker than water, siblings are thicker than incest laws. Trish has enough posing but Sonny, whose intentions are obvious, yet has a Plan B in case his photographer swindle was too subtle for the likes of his sister. He sits down on the bed and shows her a bland pair of white panties he fished from the laundry, a pair of panties she immediately identifies even if she doesn't say “What are you doing with my panties Snotty?”. Why is the demon allowing this to happen? The demon apparently wants to have sex with Trish, which I understand a demon would want to do although it seems risky because sex with Trish might dissuade Sonny from killing his family immediately. I don't, however, understand why the demon possessed Sonny when it could have possessed any blunt, fat, and long object in her room that was already substituting for Sonny long before the demon came along and got him for essentially the same purpose. Trish confesses the affair to Father Adamsky the next day, although she doesn't tell him she was sleeping with Sonny and would seem to be the most important detail to confess. Trish believes Sonny had sex with her “to hurt God” but I don't follow her reasoning because the Old Testament God seems fond of incest. If incest hurts God, why then didn't he create Adam, Steve, Annette, and Eve and let the pieces fall where they may? Later Adamsky returns to the house to bless it anew now that he knows Trish is sexually active. While he is blessing Mr. Montelli's bedroom by dashing holy water here and there, she asks him to bless the bed. Adamsky damn well knows there is another bed in the house that particularly needs blessing far more than Mrs. Montelli's that, as far as the rumors I've heard go, is the driest in the house. He sprinkles some holy water and gets sick. Adamsky goes to higher authority for permission to exorcise the house. He is forbidden to do so. Later Sonny has a birthday party. While everyone is outside having lunch in the backyard, Trish looks up at the windows and heads inside. Mrs. Montelli, who is filming the party, gets suspicious. She stops filming and follows Trish inside. This is just fine with me: she's filming a party for a posterity she will never have, and those grandchildren would be even so would be abominations. Trish finds Sonny in his room and says she's not ashamed of what they did. Sonny calls her a “damn bitch”. Trish flies away and runs into her mother on the stairs. Mrs. Montelli, hitherto as obtuse as any dick save Sonny's, is suddenly as full-blown psychologically and sexually aware, knows what they're up to, and slaps Trish across the face. Alas – the demon missed a great opportunity. If it told Sonny – just once; he doesn't need much encouragement – to have sex with Trish right there and then (it's his birthday, after all), then Mrs. Montelli would have caught them. Imagine what would happen if Mrs. Montelli told Mr. Montelli that Snotty and Sneaky were having incestuous sex right under their unrelated noses. The demon nonetheless gets impatient and tells Sonny to kill his family “now”. The massacre is rather boring, the only interesting kill being Trish's. Sonny puts the gun to her face and then the movie cuts to Father Adamsky, who I only want to see after a scene like this if Adamsky is the first name in the credits. Later Adamsky comes to the house, which is now a crime scene swarming with cops. He attempts to go beyond the crime-scene tape, but is stopped until a voice off-screen tells the cops to let him in; perhaps the director telling the extras that they are not, in fact, real cops. Adamsky finds a cross that was thrown through the window and the cops tell him not to touch it: “It's a crime scene.” Why did Sonny-demon throw a cross out of the window rather than a dead – or living – body, particularity Mark or Jan? The police take Sonny to jail where Adamsky comes to visit him. Adamsky, to whom the phrase “on your own recognizance” is probably lost, wants to take Sonny to church where he stands a better chance of exorcising the demon. Although the polcie allowed Sonny to attend his family's funeral from the back of a squad car (where the press took a picture of him in the most ideal situation they could hope for), no prosecutor worth his salt would allow Sonny to get exorcised without a psychological examination first. And even if Sonny was released, Adamsky has been forbidden to do an exorcism and would have to deal with his superiors, who would no doubt see an article about Sonny beforehand along with that flattering picture of him pouting in the squad car. While visiting Sonny, the demon has an argument with him that reveals the biggest plot hole in the movie. If the demon can leave Sonny any time it wants, it should have left Sonny already and gone back to the cellar. It is almost certain Sonny will face five counts of first-degree murder; maybe even an incest charge if the coroner finds semen in Trish that can only be Sonny's: the least disturbing suspect from whom it likely came. If the demon needs Sonny to die to get out of him, and for some reason couldn't do this directly, it could have simply kept Sonny armed and deformed until the police arrived, who would have shot Sonny dead from a distance as soon as they saw him and his scoped rifle. In fact, the demon might be the most stupid character in the movie. If it persuaded Sonny to kill his family, which I assume it attempted at least twice, then it could remain in the house and Sonny could go off to prison. But the demon possessed him and now cannot or will not leave him. Sonny has two problems; the demon one. Sonny needs an exorcism and an exoneration; but his exoneration depends on being possessed, or at least insane, and thus he stands a less likely chance of being acquitted without being possessed. The demon needs to get out of Sonny because, I assume, it doesn't want to go to prison: thus it needs an exorcism. But Sonny is in jail. Thus Adamsky has two options: he can whittle away the years waiting for permission to exorcise the demon; or, he can break Sonny out of jail, exorcise the demon, and make Sonny and himself in the process wanted men for the rest of their lives. Adamsky choses to take Sonny on an escapade. Sonny goes into a coma and the words “Save me” appear on his arm. That is the only excuse Adamsky needs to convince Turner, the deputy in charge, that Sonny must be exorcised or will die. Turner accepts this; Turner is an idiot: he gives Adamsky the keys to escape, directions on the best way out, and even has Adamsky knock him out with his own revolver. After Adamsky busts Sonny out of jail, he takes him to church, where Sonny yells “No!” upon looking at it and beats Adamsky, who had not counted on Sonny being violent, down to the ground like the fool his mother raised. Adamsky recovers but the demon puts a fire wall in front of him. Adamsky makes his way to the house, which Sonny already got into through the cellar. Why is the demon returning home? There is no one to kill there; it just had a perfect opportunity to kill Adamsky; it had a gift-from-God opportunity to go on a murder spree, if not with the gun Adamsky has, then fireballs. Adamsky makes his way through the house. Sonny eventually attacks him, but Adamsky exorcises the demon in a fashion seen a thousand times and should be no surprise to the demon when it happens. At one point the demon takes on Trish's form to tempt Adamsky, which is a cute trick but would have better been pulled off in the prison exercise yard where it would cause a riot. Adamsky calls the demon in Trish-form a “most unchaste spirit”, which is funny because “chaste” derives from the Latin cestus, which – you guessed it – is also the suffix to incestus, from which we get “incest.” Adamsky adjures God for the demon to posses him, which it does with or without copyright permission from The Exorcist. After this Sonny is taken away by the police, who do not search the house or even ask where Adamsky is. They put him in the back of a squad car with Turner, whose presence there tickles me to death because it means he did not outsmart them with his escape ruse. The movie ends with a shot of Adamsky muttering in the house, which is apparently up for sale. But maybe, after all, the demon is the hero of this movie. The demon, after killign the family, wanted out of jail, and it knew that by fooling Adamsky that it was going to kill Sonny it would make an unwitting accomplice of him. If Adamsky breaks Sonny of of jail and afterwards the demon possesses him, it gets out of jail while Sonny is in twice as much trouble as he was before. By possessing Adamsky, it can stay in the house since Adamsy – also in deep shit – will not leave because he's on the news all across America for the entertainment value of Sonny's escape. And now Sonny, sane and dispossessed, faces a murder trial and an escape attempt without anyone to defend him. Everyone loses but the demon. But the movie implies that this ending is happy because another priest, who was at the house when the police arrived, tells Sonny that everything will be all right: they will make the police belive. Things will not be all right Sonny. |