Amityville II: The Possession Reviews

This prequel to the amazingly successful THE AMITYVILLE HORROR is actually a low-budget Italian effort that presents audiences with what happened in the house before the Lutz family moved in. Jack Magner is the troubled teenaged son of a middle-class clan lorded over by brooding, oppressive patriarch Burt Young. Anguished by the usual teen frustrations and his crummy home life, Magner becomes possessed by some form of evil lurking in his house's basement. The kid finally goes off the deep end and hacks apart his entire family. The themes of incest and family abuse give the final grisly scenes a nasty, disturbing quality in an otherwise laughable film. Director Damiano Damiani occasionally conveys a few genuine chills between bouts of unintentional laughter, but overall the film is a failure.