Million Dollar Mystery

MILLION DOLLAR MYSTERY
(PG, DEG, 95 mins., theatrical release date: June 12, 1987)

How do you go from distributing seminal films by David Lynch, Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow to declaring bankruptcy by promoting trash bags and the reconstructed London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, AZ? That is the Million Dollar Mystery of Dino De Laurentiis' eternal miscalculation. Legend has it that Dino observed a crowd lining up in New York and was told they weren't waiting to see a movie, but instead wanting to gamble on the state lottery. I believe the producers of The Squeeze were also inspired by the same procession. And who knows? Maybe they were in that very line.

Dino De Laurentiis, however, wanted to give something back to the people who forked over hundreds trying to gain millions, to make undemanding entertainment for the serfs of our proudly democratic country while dangling a Glad waste bin liner full of $1,000,000 cash in front of them (that was actually the poster). The Glad Products Company were official sponsors, and specially-marked boxes offered clues that the film may not have provided viewers in guessing where the million was hidden in the movie so that they could fill in the entry form, name that location and win De Laurentiis' personal jackpot. The final tally: 356,306 people gave the correct answer, and a drawing was held to narrow the field down to one winner. So when you get right down to it, Million Dollar Mystery was essentially Dino De Laurentiis' excuse to stage his own lottery competition.

The winner, for the record, was preteen Alesia Lenae Jones from Bakersfield, CA. You'd think that, in the spirit of showmanship, perhaps Dino would select 10 or so people and someone would broadcast their own race for the prize in the manner of a game show like Supermarket Sweep. Surely, it would've helped ease the financial loss of the movie. I don't know how many wary patrons actually slammed down the $6 to watch Million Dollar Mystery, or decided on Predator instead, or if they just stayed home with their Glad products and went from there. But multiplying the number of correct applicants times the ticket price, you get $2,137,836 in potential box-office earnings. Here's what Million Dollar Mystery, budgeted at $10 million, actually grossed in the summer of 1987: $989,033.

Can't you hear its heartbeat?

The most entertaining thing about Million Dollar Mystery in retrospect is in seeing some of the premier critics of the time shilling this branded gimmick in their newspaper columns and on TV. Consider Janet Maslin of the New York Times, who actually wrote down the P.O. Box address where one could obtain a blank entry form in her very review of the film. And get a load of poor Roger Ebert, in the very same year he'd go on to obliterate Bill Cosby, "the richest man in show business," for hawking Coca-Cola to appease his corporate gods in Leonard Part 6. Maslin rightly called the movie an "afterthought" to the contest, but tries to look on the bright side in that most passive of statements: "All things considered, it could be a lot worse." Gene Siskel, Ebert (to some extent) and the Washington Post's Hal Hinson were far less forgiving than Maslin.

Boy, they're upset. And you know, I am, too!!

That's because Million Dollar Mystery is not just capitalizing on the theatre-going public's deeper-seated needs for financial security, escapist fun and waste removal supplies, but the premise itself is one of the baldest "stop me if think you've heard this one before" knock-offs this side of the equally cynical Mac and Me. A stranger dies in front of a gaggle of goofballs, but not without asking them how they'd like to get rich off a strategically-placed bounty. Dollars dancing in their heads like sugarplums, these dopey commoners run out to their cars and engage in reckless pursuit of the loot, with plenty of property and vehicular damage along the way. And the fates will conspire to make sure none of them will discover or recover the money without various slapstick encounters and comeuppances.

Your premonition is correct. Million Dollar Mystery is the 1980s model of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which had been ripped off many times before, like in Scavenger Hunt (to be fair, that 1979 version has the best cast outside of Mad, Mad World) and some obscurity called Flush (1977), which must have been made exclusively for Keith Bailey. And as I mentioned previously with The Gumball Rally, the entire automotive subgenre of Cannonballsploitation is also in debt to Stanley Kramer's wacky touchstone. With but a lonely few exceptions, you can usually tell these comic charlatans apart from the real thing by the lack of star power, their amateur replacements, the derivative gags, their abysmal timing, the harebrained characters, their crummy dialogue, the inferior filmmaking, their complete and utter indifference towards who makes the goal first. Million Dollar Mystery, alas, is no Rat Race.

Why even talk about Million Dollar Mystery as a movie, when it's so transparently a product? [sigh] Here goes nothing. Instead of Jimmy "Smiler" Durante having skimmed $350,000 in tuna factory profits, it's Tom Bosley, the TV pitchman for Glad bags himself, as government traitor Sidney Preston, who has embezzled $4 million worth of kickbacks from the Libyans. After divvying up the bounty and secreting it in four ways, he pulls over at the Apache Acres Motel and Restaurant for a bowl of their special chili. You know the old man is in mortal danger when the cook proudly lists rattlesnake and armadillo as his choice cuts, so it makes no sense to write the phrase "faster than you can say 'Change my order to the soup.'"

Faster than you can say "Change my order to the soup," Preston has a fatal heart attack and everyone else in the diner swarms around him as he hips them to the four million-dollar placements, "each one is in a bridge." He won't tell them where to begin until the redheaded waitress he's obsessed with gives him a kiss goodbye. George Kennedy in Bolero had smoother moves than the former Mr. C. A newscast on TV validates his story by declaring him a wanted man likely hiding out near his hometown of El Puente, and awaaaayyy we go!

The abovementioned hostess, Dotty (Pam Matteson), and her brother/chef/co-owner Tugger (Royce D. Applegate) lead the charge. We get Eugene...erm, Eddie Deezen and Wendy Sherman as four-eyed newlyweds mad with consummate lust. There's Rick Overton, wife Mona Lyden and moppet son Douglas Emerson, who is such a dead ringer for Peter Billingsley, I was anticipating Stephen McHattie would arrive to stalk him and kill him. I knew that was my heart's desire when, watching the nerdy nymphomaniacs suck face in the diner, he quips: "Can you imagine what their kids are going to look like?" I'm guessing they'd all resemble Ronny Howard from Village of the Giants, just like Douglas Emerson. Even more annoying are three blonde Bananarama wannabes and their handler, played by who could care less (I‘m told one of them is a Playboy centerfold).

Along the way, they encounter Rich Hall, a one-season wonder on SNL in the Carl Spackler mold; H.B. Haggerty as a pro wrestler once again, but without the fatherly twist afforded him in Blake Edwards' Micki + Maude; Mike Farrow as P.I. Tommy Sledge in a noir parody which, as Tugger is quick to proclaim, "looks right out a 1940s movie," but is still not ready for prime time even if your mind doesn't drift to Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid; and Kevin Pollak playing a deputy officer in his screen debut, wearing out his welcome fast with gong-banging impressions of Dudley Moore, Ronald Reagan and Peter Falk. That he comes across as a nightclub performer is no surprise, but his preferred destination isn't the Comedy Store, but the Bomb Shelter from Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life.

This was 71-year-old Richard Fleischer's glum finale, the dismal capper for a slump in the ‘80s that began with Neil Diamond as The Jazz Singer and encompassed additional De Laurentiis productions Amityville 3-D, Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja. I got the impression that this decade wasn't kind for a lot of Old Hollywood royalty when you find out that Diamond's co-star was Laurence Olivier (next stop: Inchon) and that Stanley Donen had gone from Charade and Singin' in the Rain to Saturn 3 and Blame It on Rio. Fleischer, meanwhile, had done Soylent Green, Fantastic Voyage, Doctor Dolittle, 10 Rillington Place, and Tora! Tora! Tora! among many others. His loyalty to De Laurentiis is touching, but just like Donen in his last movie, dumb comedy is a depressing means to bolster your retirement funds. And Million Dollar Mystery is the lowest of the low. Red Sonja is a great deal funnier accidentally than this one is purposely.

It's a bad, bad, bad, bad film. Since the talent pool in front of and behind the camera is practically non-existent, the shrill, stupid characters aren't worth enduring even for the now-hypothetical cash prize. It's so unpleasant, you feel like a hostage taken at ransom by the world's worst comedy improv troupe. Stanley Kramer's 1963 prototype escalated the absurd jeopardy to suspenseful extremes and pushed its greedy characters past the point of civil obedience amusingly. The hoary Fleischer and his writing team go at justifying De Laurentiis' gimmick with no invention or investment. The great Jack Cardiff is wasted as cinematographer, the music consists of bland boogie songs and a synth-pop cue which is a shameless nick from The Art of Noise's "Paranoimia" (where's Matt Frewer when you need him?) and the Southwestern setting makes an unintentional parallel to the barren landscape of humor on screen.

But what else can you say? Million Dollar Mystery only exists because of the contest, and while you'd never see Golan & Globus pony up a fortune in cinematic reparations ("combat pay"), the slapdash feature it spawned isn't even as rewarding as the best/worst of Cannon. Please offer a moment of silence, though, for Hollywood stuntman Dar Robinson, who died on set November 23, 1986, the result of a motorbike leap which went awry. His name pops up in the credits while Mack Dryden & Jamie Alcroft, who are the federal agents trailing the money-hungry mob, try to pad out the "It's up to you!" reveal with more third-rate shtick. Unfortunately, Dar Robinson's dedication isn't saved until the end and is also bracketed in quotes, as if it were another glib line in a movie that is nothing at all if not artificial.

Collision Course (1989)

 COLLISION COURSE
(PG, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 100 mins., video release date: May 6, 1992)

I have made passing references to Dino De Laurentiis in several of my reviews, twice in my Diane Franklin retrospective and once at the start of my Under the Cherry Moon review, when I listed off a bunch of his more Razzie-worthy releases of 1986. Dino's career managed to outlast Golan/Globus, who profiteered off the De Laurentiis-produced Death Wish, and he also began honorably in the Italian neorealist genre. He produced Fellini's La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. In the midst of all the James Bond knock-offs and barely-remembered war films he shepherded, Dino De Laurentiis was the mover and shaker behind a vast catalog of familiar flicks, including Barbarella, Serpico, Mandingo, Orca, Flash Gordon, Ragtime, Conan the Barbarian, The Dead Zone, Dune, and many others. He worked with Ingmar Bergman, Luchino Visconti, Mario Bava, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Don Siegel, and John Huston.

What I'm saying is, Dino De Laurentiis, who passed on in 2010, maintains a healthy respectability which his peers did not. Or at least did until the mid-1980s, at which point financial, critical and commercial fortunes began to dwindle precipitously.

In 1984, Dino launched his own production/distribution label, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which didn't begin putting out movies for a couple of years. Take that window of the company's inactivity as an omen. Which is a shame, because DEG released Manhunter, Blue Velvet, Near Dark, and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn by the time DEG folded in 1989. You could even trace your nostalgic enjoyment of Transformers: The Movie to Uncle Dino. But Million Dollar Mystery, Date with an Angel, King Kong Lives and Maximum Overdrive (as well as, sadly, my beloved Near Dark) weren't turning huge enough profits. Dino may have had the better legacy, but his own company went bust faster than Cannon Films.

This meant naturally that several projects got abandoned in the wake of DEG's bankruptcy. One of them I've already talked about is, of course, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, which was scooped up by Orion Pictures (irony alert) by 1989 and went on to everlasting popular appeal. Another of these was completed the same year, but came off the shelf in 1992 only to get buried on home video and forgotten by the world at large...except for the fascination of people like Nathan Rabin, Jack Sommersby, Jerry Saravia, and now me.

I'm talking about Pat Morita and Jay Leno in Collision Course.

You read those names right, as in the same Pat Morita who was once Oscar-nominated for Mr. Miyagi, the sensai of the Karate Kid series, and the same Jay Leno, Boston-bred overbite and all, who went from stand-up comedy fame to carrying on after Johnny Carson's retirement from late-night NBC. How does a movie like this find itself in such a maze of obscurity?

Well, thanks to Google News, IMDb, and other reliable online sources, I can tell you that an interview with Jay Leno dated Jun 17, 1987 reported that filming began in Wilmington, NC (at DEG Studios) six weeks prior, but they had trouble keeping a director on the project. There was protest within the DGA, which would go on strike for 12 minutes in July 1987, but this was still a month later. Yet Collision Course reportedly blew through John Guillermin (who directed both of Dino's King Kong movies as well as The Towering Inferno), Bob Clark (who directed From the Hip for Dino before finally seeing through his own buddy cop caper with Hackman and Aykroyd in Loose Cannons), and Richard Fleischer (a regular for Dino from Mandingo to the career-ending Million Dollar Mystery) in its hastened production schedule. This information comes from one Greg Laughlin, a former DEG employee, who dishes further dirt on the Unknown Movies page.

Their final and credited choice of director was Lewis Teague, whose previous credits include Alligator, Cujo and Stephen King's Cat's Eye. The latter was another Dino De Laurentiis production made at the same time Teague was courted by the majors with The Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to Robert Zemeckis' Romancing the Stone. Unfortunately, Collision Course would go wildly over-budget to the point where they barely had enough money for the final day of shooting let alone the entire post-production process. When rising star Leno began promoting the film on national television throughout 1988, there was no flow for a wide American release from DEG. Since he was under contract to appear in two more vehicles but dismayed at the delay of his first starring role, Leno briefly sued DEG for $3 million before the company filed for Chapter 11.

Worse for Leno, nobody bought the distribution rights for Collision Course away from the floundering DEG. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was rescued. Earth Girls Are Easy was adopted by Vestron Pictures (again, irony alert). United Artists scooped up both Stan Winston's Pumpkinhead and Peter Bogdanovich's Illegally Yours. Miramax salvaged Bill Friedkin's Rampage, although Friedkin undertook some controversial alterations before it played theatrically. Collision Course, meanwhile, languished under ownership of Wells Fargo Bank until May 6, 1992, the day HBO Video finally premiered the film on the wave of publicity surrounding Leno's ascension to full-time host of The Tonight Show.

Nowadays, Collision Course is most infamous as the movie with which Steve Martin once pranked Jay Leno. In December 2005, Martin, who was promoting both Shopgirl and Cheaper by the Dozen 2, engaged Leno in a televised game of "Name That Clip," with Leno ponying up $20 if he guessed wrong differentiating each excerpt taken from the two Martin vehicles. The final round was a moment worthy of Paul Rudd's trolling of Conan O'Brien, as Martin snuck in a scene from Collision Course. Leno was embarrassed when he recognized the movie, but Martin insisted that, even though he was right, Leno would still have to pay for making the film.

For anyone who ever rented the tape back in 1992, Steve Martin's stunt resembles a vicarious act of long-awaited revenge.

Collision Course is clearly an attempt to cash in on the 1980s trend of comical cop movies, and I don't mean the Police Academy series. This is more aligned with 48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop, Armed & Dangerous, Red Heat, Alien Nation, Downtown, and a handful of other pre-Rush Hour touchstones in the odd couple sweepstakes. The Eddie Murphy movies, in particular, are most pivotal in understanding the career breakthrough Jay Leno likely wished Collision Course had generated back in 1988. Both 48 Hrs. and Beverly Hills Cop launched a beloved entertainer into Tinseltown royalty, playing on Murphy's defiantly vulgar, race-baiting, talking-at-120-wpm personality from the stand-up circuit. You remember those moments:

"[I've] never seen so many backwards-ass country f*cks in my life!"
"I'm your worst f*ckin' nightmare, man. I'm a n*gger with a badge, that mean I got permission to kick your f*ckin' ass whenever I feel like it!"
"Michael Jackson can sit on top of the world just as long as he doesn't sit in the Beverly Palm Hotel ‘cause there's no n*ggers allowed in there!"
 "Tell Victor that Ramon...I found out that I have herpes simplex 10, and I think Victor should go check himself out with his physician to make sure everything is fine before things start falling off on the man."

Surely, Leno wasn't as confrontational or blue as Murphy's patter was in the 1980s, and in that same 1987 interview with Leno I found, Leno wanted a movie that was hardly as R-rated as the edgier stuff Eddie made. Maybe he felt he could've done something closer to Chevy Chase in Fletch, instead. Which is bizarre, because Collision Course feels like a watered-down version of 48 Hrs., which was full of white cop vs. sarcastic minority anti-chemistry but in Walter Hill's film, Murphy and Nick Nolte were playing off each other with top-tier precision. But all the racial jibes hurled in Noriyuki "Pat" Morita's direction, despite his deadpan superiority to them, are spouted casually without being even the least bit transgressive or aggressive.

One-liners like "I ought to stir fry your face" and "Would you call a Jap a John Doe?" die on the screen in that patented way familiar to any handful of tone-deaf late-1980s would-be comedies. Maybe it's just a sign of the times the movie wants to capture, a blue-collar Detroit embittered by the rise of Japanese auto industry and the damages done to the economy. But there was an entertaining culture clash comedy about car manufacturers made two years before Collision Course started shooting, which starred Michael Keaton and Gedde Watanabe, and it was called Gung Ho.

 Morita plays Inspector Fujitsuka Natsuo, a Tokyo espionage agent sent by his commander Kitao (Soon-Teck Oh) to track down a rogue engineer, Oshima (Danny Kamekona), who has fled to Detroit with the prototype for a spectacular new turbocharger. Oshima plots to make a quick fortune selling it off to mobster Philip Madras (Chris Sarandon), but his goons Scully (Tom Noonan) and Kosnic (Randall "Tex" Cobb) accidentally kill him during a shakedown. In disposing of the body at the nearby junkyard, night watchman Mac (Jack Poggi) witnesses the deed, so Scully fires off a rocket gun to silence him. Turns out he has murdered the former partner of robbery-assigned Detective Tony Costas (Leno), which drives him into a fit of vengeful sleuthing upon which he encounters Natsuo.

Guess what? Costas thinks Natsuo is a criminal, and Natsuo thinks Costas is a thug! Can you imagine what would happen when they realize that they're really both lawmen and have to begrudgingly partner up to take down Madras? Well, it takes a while for the skeptical Costas to accept this, because he tails Natsuo to the one-hour-photo stand and the headquarters of unscrupulous automotive chairman Derek Jarryd (Dennis Holahan). When they finally do work together, the Eastman and the Westerner bungle their way through the investigation until they end up getting one over on Scully both without a warrant and with excessive force. Costas' superior, Lieutenant Ryerson (John Hancock) breaks the act up, orders them off the case and plots to send Natsuo back to his own hardheaded boss. Again, think about the possibilities if these two unlikely friends were to disobey direct orders and retrieve the prototype despite Madras' muscle. Aren't they exciting?

Well, save for a finale which is unexpectedly brutal for a PG movie (to wit: Natsuo doesn't know karate, but he knows ka-razy!), Collision Course is standard procedure for its genre. Even getting past the leaden xenophobia, there are so many clichés on parade (barroom brawling, inebriated bonding, chase-giving cars slamming into fruit carts and flower stands) that Siskel & Ebert could've fueled an entire "They'll Do It Everytime!" episode on just this movie. Costas is a slovenly bachelor for whom Natsuo is like a mail-order Felix Unger. He cuffs the foreigner to the steering wheel to pursue a purse-snatcher, but it's the bound outsmarting the blind. Scully is a God-fearing survivalist wacko who doesn't even graze the heroes despite his arsenal of rocket launchers, automatic rifles and hand grenades. Lewis Teague turns pedestrian on the action scenes, and it's not as if Leno and Morita's banter, written by Robert (The First Power) Resnikoff and Frank D. Namei, tries to compensate with fresh humor.

Morita, who was actually a comedian back when, is at his best when he's most bemused by his inner city surroundings, from the doorbells on front porches to the inequities of the justice system. Leno, meanwhile, may be just a little too low-key to command the screen. Meant to be a fast-talking rogue and ladies' man, his moony (and moon-shaped) face hits the sweet spot between George Clooney and Robert Z'Dar, and there's an unfortunate squeak in his voice that he mistakes for "dramatic." His métier is purely comedic, like when he calms a hysterical woman on a hotel elevator down by screaming, "Shut up, lady! You're not on a game show!" There isn't a solidly-written female in the cast, to be sure, as Leno is counted on to generate chemistry with either Pat Morita or Ernie Hudson (playing Costas' doormat sidekick, Shortcut).

And comic moments are to be found, if fleetingly and frustratingly undone by conventional punch lines. The aforementioned brawl involves Natsuo initially being accosted by a group of affluent bowling alley goons (including Mike Starr in a brief role) before Kosnic's disdain for diplomacy causes all hell to break loose. Indeed, given more dialogue here than in Raising Arizona, Cobb is an amusing lunkhead, while Tom (Manhunter) Noonan, who forever looks like a new age healer brainwashed by the Manson Family, puts a wisecracking touch on his perennially psychotic demeanor early on. But Chris Sarandon, saddled with a John Oates ‘stache, is powered entirely on whatever traces of snark he didn't burn as the delightfully cocky bloodsucker from Fright Night, coming across as a mediocre heavy. And the dismally broad material routinely lets down reliable talents like Morita and Hudson.

Collision Course seems like it should be an all-time stinker on the level of Leonard Part 6 or Mac & Me, but it seems as though this film has thoroughly evaporated since 1992. And rightfully so, as it didn't damage Leno's reputation and was shrugged off by Pat Morita for the next couple of Karate Kid sequels. Lewis Teague, however, had only one more mainstream project in him with Navy Seals before sticking to TV for the remainder of his career, kind of like Jay Leno. Despite the efforts on the internet to condense the film to adequate rubbernecking length, Collision Course is hardly Showdown in Little Tokyo let alone Another 48 Hrs.

It is so, how do the Japanese put it, "wasure rare-gachina."

Enchantéd, Pt. III: Amityville II: The Possession

Enchantéd: A Retrospective Tribute to Diane Franklin 

III. Amityville II: The Possession (1982)

(R, Orion Pictures)

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1982's The Last American Virgin was an unexpected detour into adolescent tragedy, bringing into question the conflict between love vs. lust, the transfixing trauma of one-way affection and the self-sabotaging juvenilia which holds one back from shaping or accepting their reality. It wasn't as hilarious as I hoped, despite a few moments that worked on the skill of the young actors, but I was sold on the dramatic all giving-no returning between Gary and Karen. And though I tried to tiptoe my way through recapping the entire movie, once you watch Diane Franklin as Karen make her fateful decision to forgive and forget, it comes with as much humanity as it does horror. For her first couple movies, Franklin plays characters with a twinkling tenderness that ultimately wrecks the viewer, as contrivance and manipulation in the story reveal ugly fates molding a striking beauty.

So swiftly it seems that Franklin, as relayed by her autobiography, got asked to audition for Amityville II: The Possession after wrapping up Virgin. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and importing Italian filmmaker Damiano Damiani, the follow-up to 1979's The Amityville Horror was based on Hans Holzer's Murder in Amityville, a speculative recounting of the real life crimes committed by Ronald "Butch" DeFeo, Jr. in November 1974. Avoiding all conflicting theories and alternative motives, it has to be said that a tragedy did occur as DeFeo was the sole survivor of a brutal mass homicide that claimed the lives of his entire family. Whatever may or may not be true about the Lutz family's postmortem paranormal claims, there was unwarranted blood spilled. Let us not lose track of the honest-to-goodness pain of this story, especially in the wake of a 2012 scarred by the loss of some innocent souls in both Connecticut and Colorado.

Perhaps it's a combination of the real-life traumas of the last year, the stylistic dreamscape atmosphere mastered by the Italian horror icons such as Dario Argento & Lucio Fulci and my unwavering faith in Mrs. Franklin's au natural likeability that makes this particular image from the movie feel like a painful requiem for the now:

The crux of Amityville II: The Possession is the twisted story of a picture-perfect family concealing multiple perversions and resentments. The Montelli clan has for its paterfamilias a hair trigger-tempered martinet who unbuckles his belt with irrational and alarming frequency. The God-fearing mother valiantly tries to instill unity and sanity but is not safe from her husband's wrath, reduced to neglected hostage instead of beloved spouse. The firstborn son and blossoming daughter have a more solid bond, albeit one that immediately gets sullied once the residential demon of 112 Ocean Avenue settles itself in the young man's soul. The younger siblings, meanwhile, exhibit a playful rapport consisting of attempted violence. The plot doesn't need to lean too much on the supernatural as the viewer can sense an implosion could happen at any moment.

Tommy Lee Wallace adapted Holzer's book for the screen, with unaccredited punch-up from Dardano Sacchetti. Wallace worked on Halloween III: Season of the Witch around this time, whereas Sacchetti had already penned the likes of Fulci's The Beyond (Seven Doors of Death) and City of the Living Dead (The Gates of Hell). In Halloween III, the controversial choice to jettison bogeyman Michael Myers resulted in a "pod people" pastiche about an Irish-founded California town where a Celtic occultist-cum-inventor malevolently inverts the past time of "trick or treat" to wipe out an entire coast's kiddie population and, with any luck, their parents. In both of the aforementioned Fulci films, the portals to hellish realms of zombies and pestilence are blown wide open by vengeful spirits, be they a suicidal priest or a lynched warlock. Like peanut butter and chocolate, the script for Amityville II: The Possession is at its most succulent in combining these two poles of existential gloom and mystical menace.

However, Amityville II: The Possession is very much an exploitation film, calculated to latch onto prior and present box-office glories (The Exorcist and Poltergeist, namely), integrating taboo themes for deliberately vicarious shock situations (I neglect to mention Franklin's nudity in these early films because the contexts are far from titillating) and filmed on the fly with low-budget resources (notice both Jim Morrison AND Debbie Harry posters in this film supposedly set in the early 1970s?). Dino De Laurentiis began the decade with a belly flop as the producer of Flash Gordon and invested much of the early 1980s into producing horror movies, the most notable of which were Halloween II and Halloween III. Amityville II: The Possession feels like a safe bet, a backwoods carnival spookshow ride with the invaluable Lalo Schrifrin's Herrmann-esque discordance piercing your ears and the fetid stink of cavernous basement passageways filling your nose. That it ends with a self-sacrificial shouting match of "Demon Be Gone" is just further formula in motion.

But Amityville II: The Possession has moments of prosthetic and elegiac poetry so ripe with fascination that, upon the hindsight-clouded second opinion, the renegade Damiani and crew may have made the endless series' sole crown jewel.

Anthony and Dolores Montelli are played by Burt Young and Rutanya Alda at a low-key point in their careers following appearances in definitive 1970s films such as Rocky and The Deer Hunter. Hardcore horror fans may recall Young from Blood Beach and Alda from Girls Nite Out (The Scaremaker), and theatrical adverts for both have been featured in compilation releases like 42nd Street Forever Vol. 3 and Trailer War. Jack Magner has his only starring role as Sonny Montelli, bearing a striking resemblance to the charismatically creepy Malcolm McDowell of 1982's Cat People. Diane Franklin, of course, acts the part of Patricia Montelli and real life siblings Erika and Brenda Katz play Mark and Jan Montelli. The supporting roles belong to eventual hero James Olson as Father Adamsky, Moses Gunn as Detective Turner and the consummate Andrew Prine, no stranger to haunted houses thanks to 1978's The Evil, as Adamsky's right-hand Father Tom.

The idyllic opening duly shows the Montellis arriving at their new Long Island habitat in separate cars, with Anthony, Mark and Jan getting there first and Dolores and Patricia pulling up afterwards. Mother and daughter beamingly sing a bar of "Home! Sweet Home!" to which the perpetually scowling Anthony shoots them down with an acidic retort. It gets worse when Sonny, delayed by the excitement of his cherry-red automotive anachronism and the hankering for some smokes, is chewed out for not following the women and threatened with a whipping. Already, the mighty Burt Young has excelled at the seemingly thankless task of playing a teeth-gnashing ogre of such feverish dislike that even the impromptu warmth of a steak dinner as recollected by Patricia itself reveals a nasty agenda fueled by dominance and conditioned docility.

Moving into their abode, Anthony and Dolores find the windows mysteriously nailed shut and the latter is shaken up twice by bizarre phenomenon in both the kitchen and the cellar. But it is Sonny, egged on by ghostly voices emanating from his Walkman(!), who is set-up as the perfect host for the apparition who continually provokes the Montellis on their first night within the house, causing peaceful dinners to erupt into verbal tantrums and making paintbrushes turn sentient in order to deface the tots' bedroom walls with blasphemous commands and twisted images straight from a bleeding Birthday Party album ("Now pay witness to Sonny‘s burnnnninnng!").

Dolores anxiously turns to pastor Adamsky to bless their home, but neither Anthony or the other Evil take kindly to this favor. When Dolores demands Anthony visit Adamsky to give a rightful apology, the withdrawn Sonny stays behind as the rest of his family goes to church. The following sequence depicting Sonny's fateful seizure by the wicked spirit is a gonzo tour de force of pyrotechnics, practical make-up effects, blinding red/green color filters, and one particularly offbeat POV tracking shot which is heavily indebted to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, to be honest, but astounding in its execution just the same. The special effects team of John Caglione and Gary Zeller do a top-notch job of making Sonny's flesh pustulate and inflate whilst the camera careens madly and the lighting gets Technicolor lurid. The cinematography of Suspiria gets fused with the pubescent body horror of An American Werewolf in London, making for a warped moment of stylish dread that trumps anything Stuart Rosenberg's 1979 blockbuster accomplished.

No virtue goes unpunished once the now-possessed Sonny makes his way to his sister's room. At this point, Patricia Montelli begins a queasy character arc, one based on the unreliable Butch's claims, that pushes my buttons on how much onscreen abuse I can see a sentimentally-beloved young actress take. Sonny encourages Patricia to play model for him (remember a little film called Maniac, anyone?), and she even obliges his request for her to doff her nightgown. Audiences and actor alike marveled at the gullibility over this moment, but then Sonny produces a pair of panties he pilfered from the laundry. The stunned Patricia is weakened enough for the impure-minded Sonny to pounce upon her.

Bless Diane Franklin for being such a trouper, and for the cognitive capacity to get out of backseat negotiations with aplomb (for God's sake, read her book!), but growing up under the nurturing wings of Better Off Dead... and TerrorVision drove me not just mad with amour for such a vivacious, attractive woman, but also attuned me to her underappreciated comic chops and an untapped, genuine commitment to odd characters. At my tender teen age, Franklin was one of the first It Girls who I felt had an honest-to-goodness It to be noticed, one which she has preserved in the wake of her retreat from the majors. Thus, her back-to-back film debuts from the same year were a huge shock to the nervous system the first time I watched them. Indeed, people who shouted obscenities at the screen during the end of The Last American Virgin may have blissfully felt karma was dealt upon seeing her in Amityville II. In both cases, I can only sense Franklin showing me how much the love of my coziest celluloid memories are stronger than the bleakness of either Virgin or Amityville II.

Like her mother, Patricia turns to Adamsky for guidance during a trip to confession, but can't bring herself to finger her brother as the molester whose sole motivation in his conquest was "to hurt God." A later visit to the priest before Sonny's birthday bash is further proof that Adamsky is astoundingly oblivious to inner human turmoil, although he rightfully asks permission for an exorcism from the church's ornery archbishop before Sonny's final judgment. Adamsky blows Patricia off not just because he has a sermon to work on, but also because a parishioner has just passed away and Father Tom has arrived to spirit him away on a fishing trip. One reels at the possibility of him actually stepping in for five minutes to wish Sonny happy birthday, because Dolores notices the incestuous advances of Sonny and, after her psychotically-gestating brother has berated her as a "dumb bitch," Patricia is confronted by her mom and slapped across the face out of ill-minded spite (the Golden Raspberry committee must have had this admittedly laughable scene fresh in their minds when they dishonored Rutanya Alda once again with a Worst Supporting Actress nod following Mommie Dearest).

I liked Patricia Montelli, as she was the only person of the family to actually feel guilt, sorrow and moral conflict. She's a very pretty girl. That's why it's decided that Sonny will kill her last.

DeFeo reportedly murdered his family in their sleep, whereas Patricia is awake and in fear throughout the stormy, stalk-n-splatter massacre. This accounts for much of the suspense and revulsion I felt, as Sonny systematically picks off his relatives armed with one of his father's rifles, starting with his parents and then his youngest siblings. And then he concludes with a teary, pleading Patricia, and we see her being hauled off in a body bag when daylight comes and Father Adamsky, startled in his sleep, tells Tom to turn around and go back to Long Island, where he watches the police cart away an amnesiac Sonny.

The third act of Amityville II: The Possession is rather tedious, as Sonny veers between calm and crazed in plain sight of Adamsky (played with stoic semi-nobility by James Olson), who finally shows some initiative when he defies his Catholic elders and the judicial system simultaneously by convincing Tom and Detective Turner that Sonny should be broken out and taken back to Ocean Avenue for the final cleansing. And it's the phantom of forsaken, misunderstood Patricia who pushes him forward, first in a vision from the house's front door and then over the telephone. The subjectively-filmed, slasher-style evil is expositional bunkum that mixes Salem witches and Indian burial grounds but fails to create a memorable image for them, thus placing it leagues below The Beyond. And if you count all the derivations from The Exorcist with all available digits of your body, you'd swear this was produced not by Dino De Laurentiis but Ovidio G. Assonitis (indeed, this movie kind of reminded me of 1987's Lovecraftian Southern Gothic hack job The Curse, which is definitely not a good thing despite my long-time fascination with said Wil Wheaton vehicle).

The aforementioned melancholic image of Patricia at the door is the greatest reward one could attain from watching Amityville II. The movie doesn't quite give much thought to anyone other than Sonny and Patricia in terms of post-mortem madness, which is a bit of a shame since seeing the ghosts of Anthony and Dolores taunting the priest would've been warranted and allowed Adamsky a further emotional stake in his exorcism. And when Patricia resurfaces out of the blue at this point, Franklin is tarted up big time to tease the priest for his covert lust ("CONFESS!"). Even in death, this tragic little teen dream is defiled and discarded.

But let's give credit to a rather neglected source by decreeing that Jack Magner is like the Mark Patton of this franchise. This is not going to be snarky, so don't shame yourself by assuming I'll be so. I've spent so much time on Mrs. Franklin, who some quarters have cited as an inspiration for the J-horror archetype of the sullen ghost girl, that I almost forgot to say that Magner has a quiet empathy and range of expressive traits that were a lovely contrast to the glut of horror from those days. Call it the Final Boy syndrome: like Patton (Jesse of the immortal A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) or Brian Backer of The Burning, Magner taps into his blood-borne qualities with gusto, whether it be a wide-eyed look of alarm, a rakish grin or a deep-seated expression of accepted abuse. I don't know if De Laurentiis remembered him to help out for a bit in Firestarter, but let's acknowledge that Magner gives a legitimate performance in this movie, just like Young, Olson, Alda, Franklin, and even Andrew Prine in what I would consider the most inconsequential supporting role in the film. And to mix the best of both worlds, watch the playful chemistry between Magner and Franklin in single-shot moment that feels like a harbinger for the coming danger.

Damiano Damiani is also someone which who you could do worse by in comparison to, say, Claudio Fragasso. This being filmed during the banner years for cult cinema from Italy, Damiani's crackpot camera techniques and moodiness occasionally works very much in the film's favor. Lightning storms, upside-down and back-to-front Steadicam movements, the relentless darkness and shadows within the house...all of these elements are quite unnerving. It's a bit too showy and campy when the camera lens swoops on Sonny as he lays in bed, because it feels like Count Floyd just came onboard an understudy director, but the sexual implications of such gel with the incestuous angle. The last third doesn't quite have the same zip as the prior acts, and the special effects are too conventional and lack the thematic fluidity of yore, but Damiani has done so insanely much to keep you amazed by the end of Sonny's rampage that you are attentive enough to become bored.

Nevertheless, I felt the same exact way watching Amityville II as I did when revisiting The Last American Virgin after nearly ten years. There's a realistically downbeat tone to the film which is at once respectable, inconsistent and overbearing. The plot is so derivative of more bracing source material that you can sense the half-heartedness and lagging all too well. I carry certain moments from these films in my head and my heart, but I can't honestly say in good company or online that I well and truly love them as wholes. Maybe it's just the way I personally came to deify Diane, a divine image both comely and comical, but for all the qualities both good and bad in her first features, there's a reason why the gateways to geekery passed onto me when I was a boy deserve to be carried over to future generations. I'll get to them soon, but for now, and in preparation for a future Diane Franklin-themed piece, I will fashionably tempt you, Troy McClure-style, with the following words: "Hardcore Nudity!"