Amityville II: The Possession

Director Damiano Damiani's Amityville II: The Possession doesn't sit around. As soon as the Montelli family move into the film's fateful Dutch Colonial residence, the evil spirits within begin their campaign of terror, slamming doors and daubing lurid graffiti all over bedroom walls. Burt Young, as this family's father, is something of a stumbling block for these apparitions though. Rather than twig to the supernatural happenings in his new household, Young's Anthony instead batters at his youngest children, lashing them with his belt and snarling cruel invective at his screaming, defeated wife. Before long his oldest son, played by Jack Magner, is possessed by a leering entity but it's clear that this family was already shaking itself apart long before demons intervened. Anthony is a tyrannical presence, using his heft and unrepentant manner to dominant his cowed family. In that sense Magner's Sonny is positioned as something of a corrective influence in the household, at least initially. His mother and sisters seem to recognise that Sonny is the only one of them who will be able to summon up the physical strength to put this horrid little man in his place. Although Damiani's film builds its latter half around a fairly entertaining exorcism and James Olson's guilt-ridden priest, it's the first portion of Amityville II that leaves the strongest impression: the strange sympathy, or adulation, that Rutanya Alda's Dolores and Diane Franklin's Trish have for Sonny. Both mother and daughter consider him in ways that are, very obviously, completely unstuck from typical, familial affections.