What makes Amityville 2 special … possessions, exorcisms, talk to me people! Let’s go!
Pop Quiz Hot Shot!
1) Might as well start with an easy one. Where in New York is the real life Amityville?
2) Ha, on the soundtrack for this film, naturally, it has to give official credit for Happy Birthday to You. This song is famously written by whom?
3) There was a remake of the original film in 2005. How many original films were there, and since 2011 how many independent releases of related films have there been (plus or minus 5 let’s say)?
4) Orion Pictures produced the film. They have produced four Best Picture films. Name any one of them.
5) In this film the family uses the fictional name Montelli. But what was the actual name of the family in the original Amityville haunting?
Bonus NYTimes Listing Question: On January 26, 1998, this film played late on TMC. Earlier that night though this played:
What is that film?
Answers
1) To be very specific the house is at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, NY. The answer is Long Island though. I think this is the case in both the film and the movie. Amityville is on the south shore of Long Island, right across South Oyster Bay from Jones Beach Island.
2) Tough one, but also good to know. It is by the sisters Mildred and Patty Hill. The Warner/Chappell Music group owned the rights, and pursued them aggressively, up until 2015 when the copyright was declared invalid and the song, once again, entered the public domain.
3) Doesn’t it always seem like franchises stall out at eight? There were eight original films that fall into several broad categories, most notably the “haunted object” films involving clocks, dollhouses, etc. If the wikipedia is to be believed the total number of subsequent independent releases is 50 on the nose, but honestly who knows? If an Amityville sequel is made in the forest, does it make a sound?
4) You would have to think through: maybe populist as it was a subsidiary of MGM, and you’d have to think late 80s/early 90s. To me the most likely get would be Silence of the Lambs. The other three were Amadeus, Platoon, and Dances with Wolves. It went defunct in 1999 (originally), but it is still cooking. I remember seeing it pop up during the Nickel Boys screening.
5) DeFeo. The two main families are Lutz (the family that reported the haunting) and DeFeo (which was the family in which the son claimed to be possessed when he killed his entire family). Again, this is just something good to know for trivia in general I feel like.
Bonus NYTimes Listing Answer: Mary Reilly. The character wasn’t actually in the original book, it was a 1990 retelling of the original story by Valerie Martin which granted the maid character a name and told the story from that perspective.
I believe Mary Reilly qualifies for BMT. Period pieces are always a fraught prospect as they usually are bad because they are boring, not for any particularly wild and interesting reason.
Bad Movie Twins 