I Can Make Believe That You're Here Tonight

Year: 1983
Director: Richard Fleischer
Cast: Tony Roberts, Tess Harper, Robert Joy
Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

This is the moment I’ve second most been looking forward to in our Amityville marathon (the number one anticipated moment being Ryan Reynolds taking a bath, but we’ve got quite a lot to trudge through first): the infamous 3-D entry! Not only is Amityville 3-D the third film in the franchise, it’s the final third of the trifecta of Part 3-D’s that plagued the early 80’s, after Friday the 13th and Jaws had both had their wicked way with the format.

The 3-D gimmick promises a lot. It promises hilariously obvious sequences of people slowly poking long objects into the frame. It promises lengthy, unmotivated shots of glass bursting or flies buzzing that make way less sense in the unconverted 2-D edition. But most of all, it promises that the movie will embrace 80’s cheese in a profound, completely earnest way that the other entries steadfastly refused to.

This is what I need from a motion picture.

Finally the franchise has dropped the “based on a true story” conceit, untethering itself from the constraints of boring, hoax-fueled reality and instead telling a fictional story based around the real life house. Things immediately go bonkers, in the best way possible. Here’s the plot.

John Baxter (Tony Roberts) is a famed paranormal debunker who buys the Amityville house for two reasons. 1) to prove that the myths and ghost stories surrounding it are a bunch of hooey, and 2) the rent is spectacularly cheap and he needs a place to live now that he and his wife Nancy (Tess Harper) are divorced. They fight over whether this is the proper place for their daughter Susan (Lori Loughlin), who is constantly pushed into séances and other wicked shenanigans by her mischievous best friend Lisa (Meg F**king Ryan).

John insists that her fear of the house is brought on by superstition and paranoia, but the house insists otherwise and a series of increasingly disturbing events begin to occur within its walls.

Fortunately, the rent is to die for.

I’m just gonna let it all hang out: Amityville 3-D is the best of the original Amityville trilogy. It’s probably uncouth to heap such praise on a gimmicky haunted house sequel, but it’s a heady cocktail containing the best of the previous two entries. It maintains the goofy, effects-lade Dino De Laurentiis charm of Part 2, marrying that to the persistent slow boil of the original while trimming the fat that marred both those entries with a turbo-charged chainsaw.

The only thing the film truly lacks is a sense of the motivation of the evil presence in the house. It’s not trying to accomplish anything other than just being generally evil any way it can. That lowers the stakes just a teensy bit, but in exchange we get an unusually coherent plot with reasonably well-etched characters. Baxter’s attempt to find a way to define himself outside of his marriage just so happens to coincide with his pathological need to debunk ghost stories, creating a ripe conflict when his ex-wife demands that her daughter not be allowed to set foot inside his new home. There’s a complexity here that blasts the previous episodic narratives right on out of the water.

Plus, these characters are given life by a set of actors who actually had the talent to maintain reasonably successful careers, toning down the camp sensibility that made it hard to take Part 2 seriously as a horror film. And one of them is Meg Ryan! I’ve discovered a lot of skeletons in actors’ closets in my time, but this is by far one of my favorites.

I’ll have what she’s having.

By dint of including actually interesting characters, Amityville 3-D also manages to generate some choice frissons of tension that really work. They can sometimes center around silly effects setpieces, like a memorable gag set in an elevator, but they’re subdued just enough to retain a crucial glint of reality.

Not only does Amityville 3-D place its scare gags in an arrangement that actually builds up to something, they’re also some of the best in the series. A personal favorite of mine would be the walls slowly closing in on John as he works in the bathroom. And I dare any Amityville film to conjure up an image as starkly bone-chilling as the scene where Nancy sees her daughter silently climbing the stairs, dripping wet, just as John is at the lakeside, watching her be pulled from the depths by paramedics.

Sure there are some ludicrous and indefensible developments (the Portal to Hell in the basement being a huge one), but it’s all part of the roller coaster ride the film provides. For every nugget of decent family drama, you get a Frisbee slowly arcing directly into your face. It’s not a Bergman film. As long as you have it in your heart to accept the goofy along with the intense, you’ll have a good time.

And be warned: it gets GOOFY.

I’m actually a little scared by how much I enjoyed this movie. This franchise got off to a rocky start. And considering the fact that this entry was a box office failure, forcing the next half-dozen entries to be released direct-to-video, we will surely plummet back down to a rocky middle. So I don’t want to get my hopes up. But this third entry has been an oasis; a bright spot that has renewed my motivation to push forward through the franchise with vigor.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Amityville 3-D justifies the existence of the entire godforsaken franchise, but it’s at least a reminder of why I attempt these projects. It’s a diamond in the rough, made even more valuable by the swill it finds itself surrounded with. It perhaps doesn’t stand in the pantheon with the best of 80’s horror, but it’s a solid, reliable spook-em-up. Really, that’s all I want from any of these movies.

TL;DR: Amityville 3-D is a triumph of haunted house filmmaking in spite of its silly gimmickry.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1026
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

We Were Both 16 And It Felt So Right

Year: 1982

Director: Damiano Damiani

Cast: James Olson, Burt Young, Rutanya Alda 

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s rare that a sequel surpasses the original, but especially in the horror genre. Fear thrives on the feeling of the unknown, and the nature of a sequel intrinsically diminishes that. There are but a scant few Part 2’s that could even dream of considering themselves superior to their predecessors, but I would like to take this moment to herald a film that has now joined that elite group: Amityville II: The Possession. Mind you, The Amityville Horror was an exhausting bore, so it’s not like it was much of a challenge.

This is gonna be a great October, I can feel it.

Amityville II is a confusing beast. It’s generally accepted that it’s a prequel to the original film (it’s loosely based on the DeFeo murders, which occurred before the Lutz family took residence), but there’s nothing in the movie itself to suggest any sort of coherent time frame. It begins and ends with a “For Sale” sign, which could fit it literally anywhere in the Amityville chronology. And though the story allegedly takes place in the mid-70’s, the production crew didn’t make even a nanoscopic attempt to make it look that way, chucking it full of Sony Walkmen, Rocky posters, and abominable hairstyles that could only have existed in the aesthetic dark age that we called 1982.

The story follows the Montelli family, namely the kindly dishrag mother Dolores (Rutanya Alda of Girls Nite Out and the camp classic Mommie Dearest), abusive-at-the-drop-of-a-hat father Anthony (Burt Young), pious and needy teen daughter Patricia (Diane Franklin), and eldest son Sonny (Jack Magner). They move into a certain lakeside residence in Amityville, and almost immediately things begin to go awry as Sonny is seduced into murderous rages by a demonic presence. The family’s barely-below-the–surface dysfunction boils over, leading to an orgy of violence, incest, and hate that the family priest Father Adamsky (James Olson) finds himself mixed up in.

And unlike Rod Steiger previously, Olson is actually in this movie.

Only two films in, the Amityville franchise had already changed hands. The original film came from American International Pictures, which died a painful death shortly after the release, despite its phenomenal box office take. So  he sequel landed in the hands of infamous Italian schlock producer Dino De Laurentiis. Say what you will about the man, but this was the best thing for the nascent series. Whatever the sequel was going to be, it couldn’t’ help but be stupid, and De Laurentiis knew how to make stupid movies fun.

And Amityville II doesn’t mess around. Practically from minute one, the rubbery 80’s effects are flowing in full force. Just like in the original, the shock gags slowly boil into a crescendo, but here we start with bonkers mayhem like paint brushes flying around the room and whole dish racks exploding. This is a full-on effects spectacle, at the expense of anything but the most broad-strokes characterizations, but the trade-off is well and truly worth it for a film that isn’t so boring you’d want to crack the disc in half and stab it into your leg just to feel something.

It’s more of a campfest than anything, as cemented in by Burt Young’s over-the-top, belt-slinging greaseball character and Rutanya Alda’s reliably demented, bug-eyed performance. Plus, it’s just plain weird, casually introducing an incest plot line between Sonny and Patricia that’s more or less calmly accepted or ignored by the world at large. There’s also this tendency for the blocking to constantly arrange the characters like they’re posing for a family portrait. It attempts to drive home the impact of their family unit shattering, but it’s mostly just hilariously awkward.

Live, Laugh, Loathe

But really, Amityville II is pretty well put-together. The roving camera makes use of the house (and especially the creepy eye-like windows) in an actually spooky way, and there are a smattering of images that remind you that directors can do more than just point the lens at action if they really want to. There’s also a tremendously clever bit of sound design involving a ticking clock that I found genuinely chilling.

For an hour or so, Amityville II chugs along, amiably delivering silly effects showcases and Sonny’s theoretically disturbing descent into madness. Then it abruptly slams on the brakes, grinding to a halt with the late, unfortunate decision that what people really wanted to see was more of this Father Adamsky fellow. For forty grueling minutes, we’re forced to watch James Olson being put through the aces of a horrifyingly transparent Exorcist rip-off. The movie never regains its footing after that, forcing viewers through a crushing gauntlet of boring scenes of characters we’ve never met and couldn’t possibly care about. It fails to be redeemed by the allegedly showstopping effects of the final ten minutes because of how grotesquely detailed it is in mimicking the plight of one Father Karras.

The power of Christ compels you to shut this movie off!

The ending of this movie is so imbalanced and tedious that I very nearly forgot every last scrap of enjoyment I gleaned from the genuinely charming opening hour. My advice would be to eject the DVD at about 71 minutes, then use that extra time to rearrange your sock drawer, a task that I promise you’ll find more interesting than the third act of Amityville II.

But still, it does clear that low, low bar of improving upon The Amityville Horror when you average it all out. I wouldn’t call that a recommendation, but if you had the stomach for the first one, you can certainly brave wading at least one film deeper into this alarmingly sprawling franchise. Why this series felt the need to continue I’ll never know, but if the films all improve upon the last at this rate, Amityville Dollhouse will be a flat-out masterpiece.

TL;DR: Amityville II: The Possession is a fun 80's effects spectacle until it launches into an excruciatingly boring third act.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1014
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)