Even though I’ve seen POLTERGEIST about a billion times, I’ve only seen POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE maybe once or twice. It was recently showing at the Laurelhurst, so I checked it out again for the first time in years.
My memory told me it wasn’t quite as good as the original, but still okay. Boy was my memory wrong. This movie sucks.
To be fair, the filmmakers make a valiant effort but they miss the mark at almost every turn. Jobeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson are back as the mother and father of the Freeling family who have now moved in with grandma (Geraldine Fitzgerald) since the spirit world ate their last house.
The kids are back, too, with the exception of Dominique Dunne, who was tragically murdered between films. Unfortunately, Heather O’Rourke as Carol Anne and Oliver Robins as Robbie are no longer as effective as they once were. In the movie only one year has passed, but in real life the kids have aged by about four years, which means they’re old enough to realize they’re supposed to be acting. And make no mistake, you can tell they’re acting. That’s not to say they’re any worse than any other child actor or even very bad at all, but it is a marked difference between the naturalistic performances of the first film and the cutesy, self-conscious performances of this one.
The plot makes a major misstep as it spends most of its time answering questions that don’t need answers. This ends up robbing the movie of all of the wonder and fantasy that the previous one had. We get explanations as to why the hauntings are happening, and why they happened in the first film, but the explanations are extraneous to the central action and the movie wastes too much time telling the audience why instead of showing the audience how. The climax of the movie delivers on the movie’s subtitle by taking the audience (and main characters) into the “other side” which was only barely glimpsed in the first film. And guess what? It’s underwhelming. That’s the kind of thing best left to the imagination.
Still, two new characters are introduced because of these plot contrivances, and they liven things up when they’re on screen, so it’s not all bad. The best addition to the series is Julian Beck as Kane, an old, evil, skeletal Reverand who seems to be a ghost from another time even though he’s able to interact with the land of the living. Beck’s performance is super creepy and leaves an impression, even if it puts a face on an entity that doesn’t really need a face.
Will Sampson as the Native American Shaman, Taylor, is the other new character, sent by pschic Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein) to help the Freelings out this time. He’s not quite as cool as Tangina was in the first movie, and there are a lot of clichés and mumbo jumbo surrounding his Indian ways that haven’t aged well in the last couple decades. Tangina’s still on hand to help out in the spirital good guys department, but she’s strangely ineffectual and, appearing in almost the first scene, doesn’t have the dramatic presence and great entrance she had in the original film, which takes some of her power away.
There are a couple freaky fright scenes worth mentioning but they pale in comparison to the similar sequences in the first film – Robbie’s braces attack him, and Craig T. Nelson barfs up a monstrous tequila worm.
I guess the biggest weakness of POLTERGEIST II is that the tone is off. The movie wastes time attempting to explain away the mysteries of the first film, transforming abstract concepts into literal people and places. This deflates the whole movie. The first one transcended genre to become something special, but this one is happy to just wallow in mediocrity. Spielberg’s name, all over the credits of the first flick, is conspicuously missing from this one.
Note: I totally meant to mention how hot Jobeth Williams was in the original POLTERGEIST review, always running around in cut-off shorts, showing off her shapely legs. Somehow I forgot to do so. I figured I’d take advantage of this second review to mention her hotness, but I was disappointed to find that in this sequel she mostly wears ugly sweaters, mom jeans and a bad perm.
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