In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.
But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery.
Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.
I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.
I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film. Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.
Like I say, memory is a weird thing.
Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.
Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?
The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to move the headstones and not the actual corpses.
For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh. They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.
Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.
The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.
The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.
The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.
It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.
There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty.
But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.
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