Editorials
Why ‘Amityville II: The Possession’ is Still So Uncomfortable to Watch
I remember being at my cousin’s house and one of his friends telling me about this movie he saw where this dude takes naked pictures of his sister, has sex with her, and then kills his entire family. Sounds absolutely horrific by not only early 1980’s cable standards, but pretty much now or any other time… right?
He didn’t give me a title, just that it had something to do with a haunted house. All that visualization percolated inside my mind until I finally saw Amityville II: The Possession on VHS. It didn’t disappoint. It was dark, hopeless, nihilistic, and evil. I wasn’t expecting anything like that because, in the first film, everybody just had the crap scared out of them, but they lived to tell the tale. Not only did the family in Amityville II die, but they were put through a ringer of Satanically amped up family dysfunction first.
This first sequel in the Amityville saga was penned by Tommy Lee Wallace. He’s no stranger to outlier sequels with his treatments of Halloween III, Fright Night II, not to mention this one. Amityville II beat Halloween III on the release date by about a month, back in 1982, but Druid sacrifice was way lighter fare than this.
Amityville II acted as a prequel to the first film. It deals with the fictional Montellis standing in for the real-life DeFeo family. The sweet deal the Lutzs got on the house by the water was a by-product of the mass murder of the DeFeo family that happened there first. It was alleged that the killer, Ronnie, and his sister, Dawn, had an incestuous relationship, and she was also an accomplice in the murders of the other family members. Things were also supposedly rocky between Ronnie and his father, and their relationship was constantly in a state of varying volatility. Those elements coupled with a demon possession arc made Amityville II one of the most unforgettable horror films I’ve ever seen. Somehow, it flew under the radar of scrutiny or controversy in an age of video nasties.
The Ronnie Defeo character, Sonny Montelli, means well, but never seems to measure up to his overbearing Dad, Anthony. Burt Young plays the family patriarch, and he’s the dad that everyone walks on eggshells around. He could be fine one second and slapping everyone around the next. Shockingly, a deleted scene included him anally raping Mrs. Montelli. It’s a strange dynamic in the beginning because the sympathy is with Sonny trying to respect his father, but now being old enough to not have to take his crap anymore. While everyone else is submissive, he’s the only one that stands up to him.
[Related] Why Amityville II: The Possession is Superior to The Amityville Horror
After pointing a gun at his dad during a family altercation, a voice comes through his headphones that asks him why he didn’t shoot that pig, and “dishonor thy father pigs” gets scrawled on the wall by some demonic, unseen hand. Every time I hear that term in regard to murder, I always go back to the Manson Family murders. I don’t know if it was intended here, but it definitely resonates. From there, Sonny hits a downward spiral and becomes the conduit for the evil that lives in the bowels of the basement.
What is by far the most controversial and hard to stomach part of Amityville II is the incestuous relationship between Sonny and his sister, Patricia. Dianne Franklin was also the virgin in The Last American Virgin that same year. I was way cooler with the douchy guy, Rick, taking her virginity instead of her brother. They loved each other with an uncomfortable closeness to start with anyway, and when Sonny becomes possessed, he seduces her in a skin-crawling faux photo shoot that always elicits an uncomfortable hover of the finger over fast forward – but it’s hard to look away because of the disbelief that it goes there. It cuts to another scene just before anything happens, but far more explicit scenes were shot that didn’t make the final cut. What’s left to the imagination is definitely effective enough.
Later, Patricia goes to confession and tells her family’s priest and says that her brother did it to hurt God. When this happens, you suddenly realize that this family has careened past the point of no return, and they’re not going to make it. Diane Franklin is ironically the best at playing virginal in every film where she loses her virginity and she exudes a tragic naïve vulnerability. Amityville II has a giallo pedigree by proxy from Italian director, Damiano Damiani. The fearlessness of crossing social mores shows, and the only other incestuous comparison I can make to it is the creepy kid/man and his buxom mom from Burial Ground.
When Sonny murders the family, what he and Patricia did seems even dirtier when he kills her too. In a day where we are used to hearing about psychotics holding rifles and roaming through corridors looking for someone to shoot next, fortunately, I’m not jaded enough to stop finding it just as shocking as a previous viewing.
I’m a big Tommy Lee Wallace fan, and I think for all of his unfairly maligned work, he was ahead of his time. Amityville II is by far the most terrifying of all the Amityville installments, and would not find a theater friendly R rating without some cuts even today.
When the light stuff in a movie deals with demon possession, that’s pretty hardcore.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
You must be logged in to post a comment.