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In real life, the eldest son of the DeFeo family murdered six of his family members in their sleep while they slumbered in their beds. In Amityville II, the family structure is about the same -- and they all get the business -- but little else remains intact. Here we have a tale about a rough and tumble kid named Sonny (Jack Magner), who hates his father, romances his sister (Diane Franklin, best known as Better Off Dead's Monique), and gets possessed by demons who live in a secret room in the basement.
The film ultimately melds into a cheap knockoff of The Exorcist, a hugely successful movie made nine years earlier that the production team must have been hoping the world had forgotten by 1982.
Amityville II is an atrociously made film, uninteresting as a sequel/prequel and unsustainable on its own. As horror films go, it isn't scary at all, though some interesting makeup effects are balanced by a liberal use of impromptu fireballs.
Reinvented in the zeroes as a 'classic,' The Amityville Horror box set includes the first three films on DVD, plus an extra disc of Amityville-centric documentaries.
