Metacritic reviews

Director Damiano Damiani opts for an approach that's simultaneously more shameless, tasteless, and entertaining than the original.

There are some good performances here, by Jack Magner and Olson in particular, and some good technical credits, especially Sam O'Steen's editing. It's just that this whole Amityville saga is such absolute horse manure.

The new movie starts out eerily enough but soon manages even to make sensation, blood, sex and suspense become a monotonous way of life. After a while, one doesn't really care what happens to this family of five who had problems when they moved in and whom we never do get to know very well.

Supremely awful.

There are actually two films meandering in this mess – one a second-rate horror flick about a family in peril, and another that is a slight variation on the demon-possessed Exorcist theme.

From the outset, The Possession is calculated to make an alternately ludicrous and sadistic spectacle of the family's victimization.

With their flair for wretched excess, Damiani and screenwriter Tommy Lee Wallace make it hard to bear Amityville II in good humor. [28 Sep 1982, p.D6]

Clearly we are not meant to care when the eldest boy (Magner), who has been contacted by a demon on his Walkman and is gradually acquiring the rotten teeth and gooseberry eyes of the possessed, wastes the entire family. Awful.

Director Damiano Damiani occasionally conveys a few genuine chills between bouts of unintentional laughter, but overall the film is a failure.