POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE
FOX presents, When Braces Attack!

  I taped this and part 3 off of Space on Saturday, and they're even worse than I remember them!  Most of the original film's shine has worn off me, but it still remains pretty good for eye candy; the sequels cannot claim even that.

It's a few years later, and the Freeling family has moved in with grandma (Geraldine Fitzgerald), because they're broke, because the insurance company isn't going to pay up for a house that just folds itself into a singularity and disappears.  Conveniently for the family, however, grandma dies and leaves them the house.  Then they're approached by two people who complicate their lives; an Indian shaman named (Taylor) (Will Sampson), and a sinister, Amish-like guy called Will Kane (Julian Beck).  Before you know it, little Carol-Ann (Heather O'Rourke) gives birth to a catch-phrase even more pervasive than the original's: "They're back!"

On one hand, it's kind of nice to see this family again, since the chemistry between Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as the parents has always been pretty good, and at least they don't spend the bulk of this movie on pot.  Robbie (Oliver Robins) is still annoying, and is subjected to an undignified scene even sillier than when he's attacked by a tree in the original film (he has braces?  I mean, he obviously NEEDS braces, but I don't remember seeing them on him before this scene).  And since Dominique Dunne, the original big sister Dana, was stabbed to death in 1982, it's a good bet that she won't be here either, and the family makes no reference to her, as if she never existed at all.  (actually, there may have been a reference in the family's first scene; the sound was kind of garbled) Not that it much matters, since she was pretty much an afterthought in the first film.

But what's to be done with this family?  And can things please, please end with something more inspired than them being saved by their own love, or some crap like that?

Sampson is fine as the shaman (he was a shaman in real life, and reportedly performed some sort of exorcism on the set which stopped a run of bad luck during production) (and then he died), and Zelda Rubenstein unfortunately returns as the diminuitive Tangina.  But if there's any reason to see this movie, it has to be Julian Beck as Will Kane, the long-dead cult leader who makes a nuisance of himself and gets the movie's best line ("You're all gonna diiiiiiie!!!").  This man has the most skull-like face I've ever seen, and for good reason; he was in the final stages of stomach cancer during filming.  (shudder)  Tip to Hellraiser makeup artists: sixty pounds of latex makeup won't make anybody look any more skeletal, but stomach cancer just might. Beck died not long afterward, further fuelling rumors of a Poltergeist curse, people failing to understand that this man had cancer long before this film was made.  It's too bad he's only in two scenes.

If Poltergeist had good eye candy, Poltergeist II does...not.  The (Oscar-nominated!) effects here range from bad to awful, with only a "vomit creature" (really!) late in the film that seems topnotch, even though it's eventually defeated by Nelson's breath.  There are good ideas (like the enormous stone tower in the intro atop which Samson and another shaman perform some ritual), but they're botched with some really awful matte paintings and other clumsinesses.  Kane is semi-transparent in his first scene.

The plot's even more nonsense than usual (Sampson just moves in with the Freelings for a while, and then just kind of leaves 2/3 of the way through), and the action is absurd, with a flying chainsaw just scratching a car windshield (what, is this a diamond-bladed chainsaw?).  The climax indeed takes us to "the other side", where it's just a wispy, zero-gravity place where people float around.  Incredibly, H.R. Giger served as a conceptual artist in this movie, and the early, limbless stage of that vomit creature is about the limit of his apparent influence.

As for scares, forget about it, there's just a lot of "ooga booga" stuff as corpses pop up out of nowhere all the time.  I did, however, like the shot of a whole army of pure-white ghosts moving in on the house.

Not a total wipeout, but it's still bad.

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