The Amityville Horror gave us a big old house with an ugly secret past: a guy had killed his entire family for an unknown reason one year before. Amityville promises to take us back to that event and what led up to it, meaning we, as an audience, are placed in the superior position right from the beginning. Unfortunately, what we get is a prequel ridden with continuity errors when compared to the history given to us by the original along with a cut-and-paste combo of the first film plus The Exorcist.
We start with a family of six purchasing the notorious property and moving in, and right from the beginning, stuff starts happening. The mother gets bad feelings from something out of the depths of an unknown chamber of the basement which leads her right from the beginning to beg her new priest to bless the house. Well, the priest is originally driven out by her abusive husband, leading her to get hubby to go down to the church and apologize, which allows the demonic presence to possess the son, destined by part 1 to wipe everyone out.
This is likely why the movie does not make this rather significant event the focal point of the story as the actual murders occur at the story's midpoint. From here, we move to focus on the priest and his dealing with the possession of Sonny (I find the name's usage amusing; I don't know about you) and convincing the authorities that as a person, he is innocent of his crimes because of being possessed of by a demon. Yeah, the judge wasn't convinced either. If you've seen the Exorcist, you know how this will turn out: "Take me! Take me!" Wait, what genre am I watching again?
Plotwise, the almost direct rehashing of two insanely popular horror flicks really hurts this story. There's not a shred of originality to it, and a monkey could have probably strung this together. I will say that the pacing is well done -- far better than the original, really -- but the rehasing of Amityville material after only one film in the franchise along with lifting the plot of the Exorcist for the second half serves to make a film that is wholly forgettable.
Add to these plot issues that of continuity with the original film. One of the plot points of the original is that the dad starts looking like Sonny, growing out this big, bushy beard to give an unkept look. Sonny in this one never grows a beard, nor does it look like he even could. In fact, he shaves rather religiously during the 2 or 3 day total plot. That's actually the biggest problem here. In the original film, the house has a dockhouse or something behind it on the water. This film has a dock, but no house. Dad was never given time to build one.
Finally, with the plot, in the first film there was an implication that the possession of Sonny created the haunting. In this one, the evil spirits already existed and the house for sale, making me wonder what came before this. Were there other families driven from this house? A cheap backstory scene gives some info about the house's history making me feel like they could drive the story backward even further if they wanted to making this movie not the beginning, but only a small piece of a larger whole.
The characters are 90% cliche. The younger children are deliberately underdevloped so when the inevitable occurs, we don't feel so bad. The teen is given a sin to her name, so we don't feel so bad when she goes. The dad is a total stereotype of abusiveness and anit-church, so we're glad when he gets wiped out. Mom is stereotyped as well being the polar opposite of dad and beating the children because they are sinful. Bottom line is we're not given a sympathetic thread for much of anyone in this house, so when they all die, we're glad to see them go. Good riddance. You've done the human race a favor.
So it was a poor attempt at a sequel to a film that wasn't all that scary to begin with. It had its moments, and it was paced well, but that wasn't enough to save it from its own rehashed plot, and more convoluted history. If an original turn had been taken, that would have helped this immensely, and while I would say there are only so many ways to do a haunted house story, we still occasionally get some that give us something new on the genre (The Grudge and even Poltergeist which came out in 1982 as well) meaning that this could have been more, but it wasn't.
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