The Film Thread

You gotta watch The Other Side of the Wind! I’m not sure if you’d like it, but it’s Welles embracing the New Hollywood model while moving far beyond it, and also expressing disdain for it (in the pretentious film-within-a-film)…there’s a lot going on there, and it’s not like anything else he ever did. There’s something perhaps a bit…proscenium? about many of his films, but Wind is just sprawling and messy. And (this is something else I added to my earlier post just as you were replying)…Huston’s character is basically Welles (and Hemingway…and Huston himself as well…but mostly Welles)…and a core facet of the film is Welles acknowledging what a shitheel he is, how badly he’s wounded those around him (Bogdanovich in particular), and how that has boomeranged on him and turned him into an isolated alcoholic who can’t get a movie made. It’s a really brutally honest self-indictment, as if he’s turning the Kane/Hearst treatment inward on himself. It’s a flawed, unfinished, imperfect work as LateReg said (with its own really fascinating backstory), but it’s one of the most human and honest films I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, the rumour was that Criterion had the physical media rights, but nothing happened. People on Blu-raydotcom have complained they supported an Indiegogo related to finishing the film and never heard a thing.
 
Yeah, the rumour was that Criterion had the physical media rights, but nothing happened. People on Blu-raydotcom have complained they supported an Indiegogo related to finishing the film and never heard a thing.
The lack of physical release is really frustrating. Just one more twist in the saga of a film that was once held hostage by Ayatollah Khomeini!
 
Just want to say again...Welles was not washed up in the 70s...not artistically, anyway. I agree with Dom's distinction that he was literally unable to make films due to funding falling through, but not that he was washed artistically. His work on The Other Side of the Wind as well as F For Fake is just as radical as Kane.

Regarding F For Fake, that film has grown greatly in stature. It would be hard to win any argument that it is a greater film than Kane, but Fake is equally inventive and equally the first of its kind...even over 30 years into his career he was still inventing the movies. There's no reason to think somebody out there doesn't legitimately think it is greater. In fact, there was a top 50 films list that I believe originated in the UK from the 2000s that sought to think outside the box and not simply settle on all the usual favorites, and out of all Welles' films they chose Fake to usurp Kane. I will have to see if I can find it somewhere in my notes, but it's where I first took deeper notice of F For Fake's shifting status. I love it and it is on a shortlist of films I might select for a personal top 100. I think it's dazzling in its inventiveness.
 
Imo there's a case to make F for Fake is as important to the documentary form as Kane was to the narrative feature. Absolutely unbelievable film, somehow equally playful, accessible, and revolutionary. I haven't seen all of Welles' pictures, but even his weaker ones (like The Stranger) were pretty good.
 
I haven't seen all of Welles' pictures, but even his weaker ones (like The Stranger) were pretty good.
I still haven't seen his three Shakespeare adaptations (I have trouble following the dialogue), but I loved everything else. I sometimes come across arguments accusing Orson Welles of being a "one-hit wonder", but those people either haven't seen or keep forgetting about films like The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil (my favourite of his), F for Fake, The Other Side of the Wind, and others.

I hope that full versions of The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai are found and released one day.
 
Last edited:
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (Brian Gibson, 1986) aka Poltergeist: Where I Don't Land Myself in the Shit by mentioning Orson Welles Again!

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT... ALL YE WHO ENTER... etc etc...

Just going to prove that sequels can be better than the originals. This film is better from the very opening. Jerry Goldsmith immediately tops the previous film's score with an eerie blend of electronics and orchestra as we're introduced to a new supporting hero - the mysterious Taylor (played by the late, great Will Sampson), a Red Indian possessed of great powers. In an opening sequence with shades of The Exorcist, we see Taylor take on his powers and visit the deserted remains of Cuesta Verde. There he meets up with Tangina and, below the land on which the Freeling family lived, finds a horrifying tomb filled with twisted, tormented corpses. He asks what happened to the family that had lived there and thus begins the Freeling family's second journey into fear.

It's a terrific start to the film. There's something deeply sinister seeing Cuesta Verde in a dilapidated state after the previous film's Spielbergian opening. Tangina looks careworn and the characters have a 'lived in' quality not seen previously. It's hard to believe after the frequent silliness of the previous film that this is the same series. And I'll say it upfront: Brian Gibson directs this film better than Tobe Hooper (or Steven Spielberg) did the first film. It's much more atmospheric and somehow grittier.

The Freeling family have been living for the last year or so (in the real world about four years) with Diane's mother, Jess, in a rather fabulous old house in Phoenix, Arizona. Jess has clairvoyant powers and notices Carol Anne is also demonstrating psychic abilities. Jess is wonderfully played be the great old Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's son by her first marriage is the terrific director Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Let it Be, Brideshead Revisted - Brideshead being one of my favourite books and TV series!) Although married to Edward Lindsay-Hogg at the time of Michael's birth, Fitzgerald was romantically involved with...

... Orson Welles...

... and Michael Lindsay-Hogg looks a bit like him...

... and, although others have denied it, Lindsay-Hogg has said he is likely Welles's son...

Oh fuck!

I'm not doing this! You hear me, Reindeer?! You hear me, LateReg?! Goddammit!!

caddyshack.jpg

We now return you to your previous programme!

Gramma Jess is a wonderfully nurturing presence. Her daughter seems to have grown up considerably. Both Diane and Steve both seem to have developed a drink problem to replace their previous drug abuse, though. Steve is still an arse. I can't decide what the problem is with the character of Steve. Craig T Nelson is a decent actor, but his delivery of his lines and his relentless mugging makes him seem to be acting in a different film from everyone else. He comes over as a goofy Clark Griswold type, even when the dialogue is supposed to be hardbitten and cynical. Plus his hair length radically changes part way through. What's that about?!

There's much made of the importance of family here. However, daughter Dana even doesn't merit a mention. She's completely 'Bobbed', to use ER parlance. Actress Dominique Dunne had died horribly a few years before. The novelisation by James Kahn apparently includes a scene with Dana away at college (as, indeed, there's a scene written for the screenplay) but that would mean Dana was older than she was supposed to be, given only a year is supposed to have passed since the events of the previous film.

The late Julian Beck makes his first significant appearance in a shopping mall early in the film. The stranger walks through walls and people. Diane is as incompetent as ever, losing track of Carol Anne in the mall. You'd think she'd be more on the ball after the first film. At this rate she needs to put Carol Anne back in baby reins or handcuff Carol Anne to her wrist! Beck's sinister minister catches up with Carol Anne, but for some reason doesn't snatch her away.

Beck introduces himself as a Reverend and all-round good citizen... Kane, Henry Kane...

I'm not doing this! You hear me, Reindeer?! You hear me, LateReg?! Goddammit!!

caddyshack.jpg

Everything is more psychological in this film, rather than the 'gee-whiz' style of cartoonish will-'o-the-wisps in the previous film, although there are a few making appearances here. Kane has more than a touch of evil about him. He claims to be a preacher in the course of the film, but he's clearly 'The Beast' and part of what haunted the Freelings in the first film. The Freelings are strapped for cash and feel bad about living off Diane's mother. Conveniently for them, Diane's mother pops her clogs leaving them the house and all her money. Funny that! Gramma Jess's ghost even kindly calls Carol Anne after the chimes of midnight on a toy telephone and tells her to behave herself!

At the same time the family is beset by nightmares. The dreamers find themselves tormented by eerie images, particularly Diane, who experiences being dragged into the ground by corpses. Diane has to face her own psychic inheritance here.

There's much to admire here: this is a 91-minute film and packs in far more plot and characterisation than its flabby, much longer predecessor. We really feel for the family here. The performances by the cast are much more mature. The loss of Gramma Jess enhances the already melancholy tone of the film. There's something to be said for the deep family bond that keeps everyone together in a traditional old house that doesn't disintegrate like the crappy new-build in Cuesta Verde.

The arrival of Taylor at the house as a guard-cum-teacher is accepted by everyone except Steve. Admittedly, it's right in the middle of a full-blown supernatural assault, but after everything Steve's experienced, he still acts like an arse. I mean there's a sort of 'Dana Scully' scepticism and there's out-and-out pigheadedness in the face of the obvious and Steve comes over as the latter. Again, it feels like Nelson is acting in a different film. Still, it's better than Robbie, who's just there because they need more than one kid in the film. Possibly it was because they were limited on the number of hours O'Rourke could work, because everything that happens to Robbie could have happened to Carol Anne instead.

Kane's appearance later on outside the house is a terrific setpiece. He tries to manipulate Steve into letting him into the house. He works hard to undermine Steve's masculinity and belief in his ability to control the fate of his family in a manner akin to Lady Macbeth manipulating Macbeth. At one point, you think he really will open that door. It's perhaps the best psychological moment in the film. Steve survives the trial and has to head off for a vision quest with Taylor. There are some nice effects here and I was hoping all that Taylor said in this scene would make Steve man up a bit. I was to be disappointed.

Meanwhile Tangina (plot convenience) drops by for a chat with Diane (who's on the sauce again) to drop the bombshell that a religious cult believed to have been killed by Indians near Cuesta Verde might have been buried alive under the Freelings' old house. Looking at the photos, Diane realises it's all true: there's a photo of Kane and his followers. They'd buried themselves in a cave, believing the world would end in a manner akin to Ultravox's song Vienna, then couldn't get out when the time passed. I have a phobia about being buried alive. I mean, I'm so paranoid about it that I want a tomb and a coffin that opens from the inside when I pop my clogs! This aspect of the film creeps me out. Evidently the cult suffocated down there the way Othello smothered Desdemona. Just grim!! The corpses we saw in the opening sequence are thus explained.

For some inexplicable reason, Steve returns home a one man band. Taylor doesn't come with him, because it's convenient for the plot. Far from being enlightened and emboldened to save his family, Steve gets shitfaced on tequila. How the f*** he drank that much tequila and didn't pass out is beyond me. I've done plenty of shots of tequila in the past and suffered for it, but he's downing half bottles and more in one go! Of course, alcohol is the Devil's drink and the Reverend Kane's soul is somehow in the worm in the tequila. He thus possesses Steve and goes on a rapey rampage, including hinting that Diane had wanted to abort Carol Anne. Diane doesn't realise what's happening at first not realising that the booze-sodden animal attacking her is really the randy rev the getting stiff. For fakely assuming the identity of her husband, the rev faces the one thing that can injure him. Diane's love for her husband. There's a great effect where Steve vomits up a monster version of the Rev that grows larger and larger until it becomes an HR Giger-type monster. Steve fights him off with a Richard Edlund will-o'-the-wisp, which is a bit of an anticlimax.

All this leads to a larger, bizarre Gremlins-esque attack on the family and them fleeing to Cuesta Verde to face off against the Rev and his ghostly acolytes. This stretches credibility. If we take it as read that Cuesta Verde is the Poltergeist universe version of California's Simi Valley from the first film, that's a 400+ mile journey from Phoenix. In a knackered station wagon. One that's just been cut up by floating demon-powered chainsaws. And is being driven by a bloke who just downed most of a bottle of tequila! I'd feel safe? Wouldn't you?

The big finale is a bit hit and miss. Somehow, Tangina is waiting for the family when they get to Phoenix. Then Taylor returns at exactly the right moment to help out too. The special effects finale is a bit disappointing: there are some golden clouds, some magnificent ambers on silvery, shimmering layers of blue and pink, there's some glowing light, the Rev (now a monster designed by HR Giger, but not manufactured and filmed to his satisfaction) gets stopped far too easily and, just as Carol Anne is about to be lost to the Light, Gramma saves her. It's the immortal story of family love saving the day!

I just don't get why more time wasn't devoted in these films to the 'Other Side'.

Of the winding cave system and its tormented corpses, there really isn't enough seen of them; rather than spend time and budget on the house and the chainsaw attack on the carl, Steve should have followed Taylor's advice and taken the family directly to Cuesta Verde after the vision quest. It strikes me that the 'Other Side' should have been more like the Upside Down of Stranger Things or the demon realm seen in Insidious Part 2. It's a very disappointing finale.

For all its faults, I enjoyed this film (the Blu-ray is also excellent quality!) It's almost 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor and much better paced. I believe there was a lot of material cut from the film that was shot and much scripted and not shot. The James Kahn novelisation expands things greatly, including the tragic fate of Dr Lesh, which is partly why Tangina distrusts her own psychic abilities now. I like the way the family seems somewhat hardened and their bond is much stronger.

Richard Edlund's effects are more horrific here and aided greatly by Andrew Laszlo's excellent cinematography. Laszlo was coming to the end of his career, but he'd made his mark in TV and in cinema with the likes of Shōgun, The Warriors and The Funhouse (with Tobe Hooper.) He would go on to work on Joe Dante's Innerspace and William Shatner's Star Trek V, among others, before retiring. He never worked with Orson Welles.

Julian Beck made his final appearance here, posthumously. He died eight months earlier and some of his dialogue had to be looped by another actor. He never worked with Orson Welles either.

His look reminds me of the Gentlemen in the famous Buffy, the Vampire Slayer episode Hush.

MV5BNTBhMzA0ZGEtNDc4MS00ZDNmLTlhZGQtMjBhYTM4NDZkZTFhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjQ4ODE4MzQ@._V1_-3396987936.jpg f955f6980d9ca8e1e78bf9b338f3d03b-3821260095.jpg

It was helpful to give the evil a proxy human face this time, although we get the impression the caves wouldn't let the Reverend's cult out, so there are clearly other forces at work yet to be explored.

Sadly, just as things were getting intriguing, this was the last time any of the original Freeling family appeared in a Poltergeist film, other than Carol Anne, and Heather O'Rourke wouldn't live to see the release of the third film.

The film ends on a goofy note with a repeated gag about Taylor wanting the family's 'angry' car. As Taylor drives off in the car, the family realise they're stranded and run after it. Couldn't they just ask Tangina for a lift, since she's still, presumably, there?

I like this film series. It's intriguing in spite of its countless flaws. I like the messed-up Freeling family, who are one comedy step away from Al and Peggy Bundy's brood, and similarly stick together come what may. In a Hollywood where broken families are arguably the norm, it's a rare treat to see a dad, mum and kids all living together, even if they are borderline Bundys!!! Even if the parents have a habit of abandoning and losing their kids and forgetting they have an older daughter altogether. A bit like the way the Bundy's forgot their adopted child!! I'll keep an eye out to see if Dana's face appears on a milk carton in the next film!!

The Poltergeist series has one film to go, plus a remake, so I'm not expecting a lot next time. At least Heather O'Rourke is still the heroine!
 

Attachments

  • Screen+Shot+2020-08-03+at+7.44.51+PM.png
    Screen+Shot+2020-08-03+at+7.44.51+PM.png
    354.6 KB · Views: 2
Last edited:
Poltergeist III (Gary Sherman, 1988)

I'm always iffy about new teams taking over films and series along with established characters. I have a bigger issue with prequels doing that when no originators are involved and especially if previously-existing characters are recast - Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are particularly egregious examples. I had no real issue with the Friday the 13th films continuing under different creators, as the concept of Jason was really the only thing gluing them together and Jason being regularly redefined was part and parcel of the series.

As a result, I wasn't sure what to expect with Poltergeist III. We have a new writing and production team headed by Gary Sherman who made the trashy, highly enjoyable Rutger Hauer vehicle Wanted: Dead or Alive a couple of years earlier. Sherman and his team decided to change setting and only keep Heather O'Rourke's Carol Anne and Zelda Rubinstein's Tangina Barrons. Replacing the hapless Freeling parents are Carol Anne's aunt on her mother's side - Trish (who likes to be called 'Pat') and her wealthy older building manager husband, Bruce. 'So what attracted you to your multimillionaire husband, Pat?' Bruce has a daughter called 'Donna' who looks suspiciously like the original actress to play Donna in Twin Peaks! ;)

Hiring Tom Skerritt to play Bruce was good casting. Skerritt is one of those solid-as-a-rock, dependable actors who brings gravitas to any film, no matter how bad. Nancy Allen plays Pat. Obviously Allen had a long history of playing sexy, vampish characters, notably in her ex-husband Brian De Palma's films. However, the first time I ever saw Nancy Allen in a film was in 1988, when I was 13, and that film was Robocop. Second time was in Blow Out. In my mind, she's forever connected to Officer Lewis. Poltergeist III finds Allen in a more typically glamorous role, although she still has Lewis's short hair. Lara Flynn Boyle plays Bruce's daughter from a previous marriage, Donna. Damn, Lara was a stunning looking girl back in the day! I could swear the dialogue between Donna and her friends was lifted from Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl.

Heather O'Rourke was poorly during filming and was receiving cortisone injections. It's immediately noticeable how bloated her face looks, poor thing. She was born in the same year as me (fellow Capricorn too) so I take something personally about her death. I think about all those years I fucked around when that poor girl could have lived a better life than me! It brings you up short seeing the film dedicated to 'Heather O'Rourke 1975-1988.' A classmate of mine died in an accident during the summer of 1988, I remember. Seeing his family at that funeral still haunts me.

Anyway, the film's moved away from suburbia to a swanky apartment block in Chicago. This is a monster size 100-storey building with shopping mall, restaurants, bars, swimming pools: a veritable city in one edifice. Creepily, there are cameras everywhere. Carol Anne is staying with her aunt and uncle and attending a special school for troubled, gifted children. Unfortunately, her school isn't run by Professor X: it's run by a pervy malpractice-suit-waiting-to-happen called Dr Seaton. Seaton has been hypnotising Carol Anne, believing she has the gift to convince people around her that they are seeing things that aren't there. In short: everything that we've seen in previous films that has happened around her is a trick she's implanted in people's minds. He's a charlatan and a fool and, in digging around in Carol Anne's subconscious, he's revived the evil spirit of Reverend Kane.

Kane looks different here - now played by Nathan Davis under heavy make up. In a nice gesture, Julian Beck gets a credit as the original actor to play the role - something I don't remember seeing in a film before. Corey Burton, who provided some ADR for Kane in postproduction on Poltergeist II following Beck's death, provides the voice for Kane here too. I think it was a mistake to bring back Kane. I'm a great believer in moving on when you've defeated a villain. Bringing back Gozer in Ghostbusters: Afterlife spoiled that film for me and the less said for the resurrection of Agent Smith after The Matrix, the better! I'm not sure what Kane wants here... something to do with needing Carol Anne to lead him into the light because she's an innocent child. Can't he just go into the light himself? And who are all the demonic entities hanging around him? His followers went into the light in the previous film.

The upshot of all this is that, one night, circumstances fall into place where Aunt and Uncle are downstairs at the launch of an art exhibit for a Japanese bloke who dresses like Sadako Yamamura and makes crap 'art' that sells for stupid amounts of money to people too rich and too stupid to care what they're wasting their money on. Meanwhile, Donna has an itch south of the navel for a guy called Scott (Kip Wentz) and gets him and some of his friends to go to a swimming pool on a different floor in the building. She tells everyone where to find swimsuits. If this had been a Friday the 13th, they'd have all been naked! Scott is such a drip that I can't understand what she sees in him. He's about as masculine a presence as Jesse from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2! This results in Carol Anne being left alone in the apartment when all Hell breaks loose.

First off, I have to credit Gary Sherman and his team for the production design. There are mirrors everywhere (a bit like the intended ending of The Lady from Shanghai) and locations always feel out of kilter. From the outset, you know there's something wrong with the shots. It niggles and you can't explain why. Then you realise the camera should be reflected in the mirrors, but it isn't.

Sherman, who designed the effects himself, and his team used in-camera trickery and body doubles to give the impression of reflections when he was actually using double size rooms with glass and doubles. It's very clever. Moreover, he makes use of reflections moving out of sync with the characters, which means you're never sure what is a real reflection and what isn't. It means you're constantly on tenterhooks wondering if a reflection's about to take on a life of its own. It also means that when the body doubles don't move perfectly in sync, the filmmakers can get away with it. It reminds me of a most enjoyable South Korean horror film, called Into the Mirror, that I saw years ago. The US remake, I believe, was called Mirrors, although I've never seen it.

The story is fairly straightforward: Kane wants to go into the light and wants to abduct Carol Anne to do so. We're told he's evil and 'The Beast', but after the second film, he seems pretty pitiful. The film had a lot of budgetary issues and changes made on the hoof during production which means there are chunks of the story that don't go anywhere and I wonder if some motivation got cut. There doesn't appear to be a James Kahn novelisation to clear up these issues either.

When Carol Anne is pulled into the 'Other Side' - which is portrayed as exactly the sort of 'mirror dimension' I felt it should have been in the first film - Donna and Scott get dragged in with her. Scott is returned via the swimming pool later on and Donna returns in a spectacularly creepy sequence involving Tangina getting freeze-dried and Donna climbing out of Tangina's corpse. 'Donna' and 'Scott' turn out to be murderous doubles, but all the doubles do is kill off one character, then walk away together, never to be seen again. It felt like so much more could have been done with them.

I digress to mention that I love the effects work and makeup work here: you notice the film includes names such as Doug Drexler (look him up, the guy has too many credits to put in parentheses) and Dick Smith (the same as Doug, although his makeup effects on The Exorcist seem worth pointing out for comparison!) Again, these effects were done in studio, not with lots of optically-printed effects. The film really benefits from that.

On the other hand, the fashions stand out in this film. What we consider '1980s style' for clothes, haircuts and so on kicks in during the mid-1980s (around Miami Vice's launch) and runs on to about 1993. As a result, there's an 80s look to this film that the earlier films don't have, resembling the late 1970s more than what we consider 'the 80s'.

The ending is a washout again, sadly. The film just kind of stops. Pat is facing off against Kane when Tangina's ghost suddenly shows up, tells Kane she'll take him into the light and does so, telling Pat that Carol Anne is safe forever now... and we're done. Bruce emerges from the mirror world with Donna and Carol Anne in tow and it's the end! No mention of poor old Scott! For that matter earlier on Carol Anne talks about her family and never mentions Dana, so Dana really has disappeared. There's actually a sequel in the concept of the family forgetting one of the children ever existed!

The film's postproduction was difficult. The ending we see in the film isn't the original. The original, which can be seen without audio on the US Shout! Factory release (not available here in the UK!) or 'YouKnowWhere', suffers from some vaguely hilarious looking frozen dummies was replaced in postproduction. However, tragedy struck during post and Heather O'Rourke died shortly after her 12 birthday. Gary Sherman, to be fair to him, told MGM that they should scrap this film and never release it. MGM felt differently. The ending we get includes a body double for the deceased Heather O'Rourke. I'm baffled as to why the final shot of the original ending wasn't used as it included the whole family and Scott.

It's a scrappy ending to an odd series of films: one that started out with an 80s Spielbergian adventure film clashing with a horror screenplay, a decent sequel and a second sequel that is perfectly respectable by 1980s genre franchise standards. Poltergeist III has some decent performances, several great set pieces, some very clever camerawork, special effects and makeup effects, but is let down in the long run by the pointlessness of the film's existence. I found myself wishing Tom Skerritt had been hired to play Steve in the first two films: he's a much more solid presence and I can imagine he'd have given those cynical one-liners of Steve's in the sequel some zing.

Poltergeist III had terrible box office. It was a difficult film to promote and the cast were told to shun publicity. Gary Sherman might well have been right to tell the studio to abandon the film. I think it was worth releasing, because for all its flaws and there's a lot of fun stuff in it. It'll never live down the death of Heather O'Rourke though.

I've enjoyed watching these films. The first is - in my opinion - overrated and extremely derivative, with Spielberg and Hooper blatantly stealing from Twilight Zone episodes they grew up with. In fairness, that 'Spielbergian' vibe was in its infancy at the time, so it's a case of something that hasn't aged well. The sequels weren't necessary, but were better than they ought to be. I just never got a grip on what the evil was about in the films and why Carol Anne and the other Freelings were particularly of interest to these dark forces. Elm Street's Freddy wanted revenge, Jason was a survivalist killing machine turned zombie, the forces in the Poltergeists just exist, want to go into the light until we're told in the next film that they didn't go into the light after all and need to go into the light this time.

In terms of third film personnel, Tom Skerritt and Nancy Allen are still going strong at 90 and 73, respectively. Gary Sherman is in his late 70s, teaching film directing. He made a few other films for cinema and TV and directed plenty of TV shows. He was Executive Producer on Poltergeist: The Legacy, which supposedly has nothing to do with the movies, although I seem to remember reading somewhere that Dr Lesh and Tangina are retconned in the series as being tied to The Legacy organisation.

I might have a look at the Poltergeist remake at some point, purely out of interest. I see it made a bit of money at the box office, albeit far from a bonanza. The film series itself feels somewhat hamstrung by the number of deaths associated with it. I'm not saying this for superstitious reasons, but a lot of people connected with these films died around the time they were made or were in production. It's about respecting the dead. I look at Dominique Dunne and Heather O'Rourke with a great deal of sadness and think what might have been, who they could have been if they'd grown up, married, had children and so on. The remake at least had the sense not to use the same character names. It's a bit like The Crow, though, in that there's forever a cloud hanging over the series. Some series need to retire after certain events.

Poltergeist had a lot of promise, but arguably only the first film early on has much to do with actual poltergeists. The only way to make a new Poltergeist film, in my mind is to go back to what poltergeists are; look at what poltergeist activity is about. Then make a film based on that. Use different characters and a different setting and ditch anything similar to that of the previous films, so no family, no kids: give us a completely different scenario involving naughty spirits.

And with that, I've knocked off another classic horror series. Next up is The Nun II.
 
Last edited:
Poltergeist III (Gary Sherman, 1988)

I'm always iffy about new teams taking over films and series along with established characters. I have a bigger issue with prequels doing that when no originators are involved and especially if previously-existing characters are recast - Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are particularly egregious examples. I had no real issue with the Friday the 13th films continuing under different creators, as the concept of Jason was really the only thing gluing them together and Jason being regularly redefined was part and parcel of the series.

As a result, I wasn't sure what to expect with Poltergeist III. We have a new writing and production team headed by Gary Sherman who made the trashy, highly enjoyable Rutger Hauer vehicle Wanted: Dead or Alive a couple of years earlier. Sherman and his team decided to change setting and only keep Heather O'Rourke's Carol Anne and Zelda Rubinstein's Tangina Barrons. Replacing the hapless Freeling parents are Carol Anne's aunt on her mother's side - Trish (who likes to be called 'Pat') and her wealthy older building manager husband, Bruce. 'So what attracted you to your multimillionaire husband, Pat?' Bruce has a daughter called 'Donna' who looks suspiciously like the original actress to play Donna in Twin Peaks! ;)

Hiring Tom Skerritt to play Bruce was good casting. Skerritt is one of those solid-as-a-rock, dependable actors who brings gravitas to any film, no matter how bad. Nancy Allen plays Pat. Obviously Allen had a long history of playing sexy, vampish characters, notably in her ex-husband Brian De Palma's films. However, the first time I ever saw Nancy Allen in a film was in 1988, when I was 13, and that film was Robocop. Second time was in Blow Out. In my mind, she's forever connected to Officer Lewis. Poltergeist III finds Allen in a more typically glamorous role, although she still has Lewis's short hair. Lara Flynn Boyle plays Bruce's daughter from a previous marriage, Donna. Damn, Lara was a stunning looking girl back in the day! I could swear the dialogue between Donna and her friends was lifted from Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl.

Heather O'Rourke was poorly during filming and was receiving cortisone injections. It's immediately noticeable how bloated her face looks, poor thing. She was born in the same year as me (fellow Capricorn too) so I take something personally about her death. I think about all those years I fucked around when that poor girl could have lived a better life than me! It brings you up short seeing the film dedicated to 'Heather O'Rourke 1975-1988.' A classmate of mine died in an accident during the summer of 1988, I remember. Seeing his family at that funeral still haunts me.

Anyway, the film's moved away from suburbia to a swanky apartment block in Chicago. This is a monster size 100-storey building with shopping mall, restaurants, bars, swimming pools: a veritable city in one edifice. Creepily, there are cameras everywhere. Carol Anne is staying with her aunt and uncle and attending a special school for troubled, gifted children. Unfortunately, her school isn't run by Professor X: it's run by a pervy malpractice-suit-waiting-to-happen called Dr Seaton. Seaton has been hypnotising Carol Anne, believing she has the gift to convince people around her that they are seeing things that aren't there. In short: everything that we've seen in previous films that has happened around her is a trick she's implanted in people's minds. He's a charlatan and a fool and, in digging around in Carol Anne's subconscious, he's revived the evil spirit of Reverend Kane.

Kane looks different here - now played by Nathan Davis under heavy make up. In a nice gesture, Julian Beck gets a credit as the original actor to play the role - something I don't remember seeing in a film before. Corey Burton, who provided some ADR for Kane in postproduction on Poltergeist II following Beck's death, provides the voice for Kane here too. I think it was a mistake to bring back Kane. I'm a great believer in moving on when you've defeated a villain. Bringing back Gozer in Ghostbusters: Afterlife spoiled that film for me and the less said for the resurrection of Agent Smith after The Matrix, the better! I'm not sure what Kane wants here... something to do with needing Carol Anne to lead him into the light because she's an innocent child. Can't he just go into the light himself? And who are all the demonic entities hanging around him? His followers went into the light in the previous film.

The upshot of all this is that, one night, circumstances fall into place where Aunt and Uncle are downstairs at the launch of an art exhibit for a Japanese bloke who dresses like Sadako Yamamura and makes crap 'art' that sells for stupid amounts of money to people too rich and too stupid to care what they're wasting their money on. Meanwhile, Donna has an itch south of the navel for a guy called Scott (Kip Wentz) and gets him and some of his friends to go to a swimming pool on a different floor in the building. She tells everyone where to find swimsuits. If this had been a Friday the 13th, they'd have all been naked! Scott is such a drip that I can't understand what she sees in him. He's about as masculine a presence as Jesse from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2! This results in Carol Anne being left alone in the apartment when all Hell breaks loose.

First off, I have to credit Gary Sherman and his team for the production design. There are mirrors everywhere (a bit like the intended ending of The Lady from Shanghai) and locations always feel out of kilter. From the outset, you know there's something wrong with the shots. It niggles and you can't explain why. Then you realise the camera should be reflected in the mirrors, but it isn't.

Sherman, who designed the effects himself, and his team used in-camera trickery and body doubles to give the impression of reflections when he was actually using double size rooms with glass and doubles. It's very clever. Moreover, he makes use of reflections moving out of sync with the characters, which means you're never sure what is a real reflection and what isn't. It means you're constantly on tenterhooks wondering if a reflection's about to take on a life of its own. It also means that when the body doubles don't move perfectly in sync, the filmmakers can get away with it. It reminds me of a most enjoyable South Korean horror film, called Into the Mirror, that I saw years ago. The US remake, I believe, was called Mirrors, although I've never seen it.

The story is fairly straightforward: Kane wants to go into the light and wants to abduct Carol Anne to do so. We're told he's evil and 'The Beast', but after the second film, he seems pretty pitiful. The film had a lot of budgetary issues and changes made on the hoof during production which means there are chunks of the story that don't go anywhere and I wonder if some motivation got cut. There doesn't appear to be a James Kahn novelisation to clear up these issues either.

When Carol Anne is pulled into the 'Other Side' - which is portrayed as exactly the sort of 'mirror dimension' I felt it should have been in the first film - Donna and Scott get dragged in with her. Scott is returned via the swimming pool later on and Donna returns in a spectacularly creepy sequence involving Tangina getting freeze-dried and Donna climbing out of Tangina's corpse. 'Donna' and 'Scott' turn out to be murderous doubles, but all the doubles do is kill off one character, then walk away together, never to be seen again. It felt like so much more could have been done with them.

I digress to mention that I love the effects work and makeup work here: you notice the film includes names such as Doug Drexler (look him up, the guy has too many credits to put in parentheses) and Dick Smith (the same as Doug, although his makeup effects on The Exorcist seem worth pointing out for comparison!) Again, these effects were done in studio, not with lots of optically-printed effects. The film really benefits from that.

On the other hand, the fashions stand out in this film. What we consider '1980s style' for clothes, haircuts and so on kicks in during the mid-1980s (around Miami Vice's launch) and runs on to about 1993. As a result, there's an 80s look to this film that the earlier films don't have, resembling the late 1970s more than what we consider 'the 80s'.

The ending is a washout again, sadly. The film just kind of stops. Pat is facing off against Kane when Tangina's ghost suddenly shows up, tells Kane she'll take him into the light and does so, telling Pat that Carol Anne is safe forever now... and we're done. Bruce emerges from the mirror world with Donna and Carol Anne in tow and it's the end! No mention of poor old Scott! For that matter earlier on Carol Anne talks about her family and never mentions Dana, so Dana really has disappeared. There's actually a sequel in the concept of the family forgetting one of the children ever existed!

The film's postproduction was difficult. The ending we see in the film isn't the original. The original, which can be seen without audio on the US Shout! Factory release (not available here in the UK!) or 'YouKnowWhere', suffers from some vaguely hilarious looking frozen dummies was replaced in postproduction. However, tragedy struck during post and Heather O'Rourke died shortly after her 12 birthday. Gary Sherman, to be fair to him, told MGM that they should scrap this film and never release it. MGM felt differently. The ending we get includes a body double for the deceased Heather O'Rourke. I'm baffled as to why the final shot of the original ending wasn't used as it included the whole family and Scott.

It's a scrappy ending to an odd series of films: one that started out with an 80s Spielbergian adventure film clashing with a horror screenplay, a decent sequel and a second sequel that is perfectly respectable by 1980s genre franchise standards. Poltergeist III has some decent performances, several great set pieces, some very clever camerawork, special effects and makeup effects, but is let down in the long run by the pointlessness of the film's existence. I found myself wishing Tom Skerritt had been hired to play Steve in the first two films: he's a much more solid presence and I can imagine he'd have given those cynical one-liners of Steve's in the sequel some zing.

Poltergeist III had terrible box office. It was a difficult film to promote and the cast were told to shun publicity. Gary Sherman might well have been right to tell the studio to abandon the film. I think it was worth releasing, because for all its flaws and there's a lot of fun stuff in it. It'll never live down the death of Heather O'Rourke though.

I've enjoyed watching these films. The first is - in my opinion - overrated and extremely derivative, with Spielberg and Hooper blatantly stealing from Twilight Zone episodes they grew up with. In fairness, that 'Spielbergian' vibe was in its infancy at the time, so it's a case of something that hasn't aged well. The sequels weren't necessary, but were better than they ought to be. I just never got a grip on what the evil was about in the films and why Carol Anne and the other Freelings were particularly of interest to these dark forces. Elm Street's Freddy wanted revenge, Jason was a survivalist killing machine turned zombie, the forces in the Poltergeists just exist, want to go into the light until we're told in the next film that they didn't go into the light after all and need to go into the light this time.

In terms of third film personnel, Tom Skerritt and Nancy Allen are still going strong at 90 and 73, respectively. Gary Sherman is in his late 70s, teaching film directing. He made a few other films for cinema and TV and directed plenty of TV shows. He was Executive Producer on Poltergeist: The Legacy, which supposedly has nothing to do with the movies, although I seem to remember reading somewhere that Dr Lesh and Tangina are retconned in the series as being tied to The Legacy organisation.

I might have a look at the Poltergeist remake at some point, purely out of interest. I see it made a bit of money at the box office, albeit far from a bonanza. The film series itself feels somewhat hamstrung by the number of deaths associated with it. I'm not saying this for superstitious reasons, but a lot of people connected with these films died around the time they were made or were in production. It's about respecting the dead. I look at Dominique Dunne and Heather O'Rourke with a great deal of sadness and think what might have been, who they could have been if they'd grown up, married, had children and so on. The remake at least had the sense not to use the same character names. It's a bit like The Crow, though, in that there's forever a cloud hanging over the series. Some series need to retire after certain events.

Poltergeist had a lot of promise, but arguably only the first film early on has much to do with actual poltergeists. The only way to make a new Poltergeist film, in my mind is to go back to what poltergeists are; look at what poltergeist activity is about. Then make a film based on that. Use different characters and a different setting and ditch anything similar to that of the previous films, so no family, no kids: give us a completely different scenario involving naughty spirits.

And with that, I've knocked off another classic horror series. Next up is The Nun II.
Yeah this film does deserve praise for its great mirror effects! That’s just about the only positive I can mention for this installment. I admittedly find it a little hard to watch this one — every frame with Heather O’Rourke reminds me of her untimely demise. That’s not the films fault, but it’s just upsetting to see her appearance in this knowing about her health problems irl.

Director Gary Sherman also helmed the erotic thriller “Lisa”(1990) — not a great film by any means, but I have a weird fondness for it. Its opening music is very creepy, although when the saxophone hits it feels like a jazzy parody of Angelo Badalamenti.
 
Yeah this film does deserve praise for its great mirror effects!
They're very well done. I kept on trying to spot what was being done and where. The fact that reflections would come alive meant that they could get away with fake mirrored movements not always quite syncing. You find yourself on edge the whole time wondering which reflections are real.

That’s just about the only positive I can mention for this installment.
I have to admit I'm a bit more positive. Purely looking at it from the perspective of sequels in the 1980s, I've seen a heck of a lot worse. It's moved a long way from the original, but not having any great emotional attachment to the original film, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just feels like there are loads of good ideas, some very clever direction, but the story is weak. Then again, there was clearly a lot of stuff going one behind the scenes and there was obviously significant story material dropped.

One thing I will say is that horror films can get away with a bit of clunkiness as long as they hover around the 90-minute mark. It's when they disappear up their own arses, develop intellectual pretensions and hit the two hour-plus mark that I lose patience. Only a few horror films such as The Exorcist can get away with two hour-plus runtimes. At 90-ish minutes, it filled a bit of time and didn't stick around long enough to offend me.

I admittedly find it a little hard to watch this one — every frame with Heather O’Rourke reminds me of her untimely demise. That’s not the films fault, but it’s just upsetting to see her appearance in this knowing about her health problems irl.
Yeah, it's horrible to see her looking so bloated. It's the first thing I noticed when the film started. Poor girl. And she must have been awfully conscious of it at such a vulnerable age, as well as suffering terrible pain (and I've had bad gastric problems that have dogged me since I was born, so I know how that is, including having all the invasive tests.) To me, Heather O'Rourke's death really should have seen the immediate retirement of the series, the same way Brandon Lee's death should have made The Crow film a standalone work with no sequels or remakes.

I actually think the studio should have taken Gary Sherman's advice and binned Poltergeist III. They should have put back the release date a year, reworked the script, reused some of what they already had in the can and done some reshoots, turning what they had into a non-Poltergeist horror film. They'd worked out all these fantastic scenes and there's a load of material without Carol Anne. Maybe they could have made Lara the 'last girl' main character. The mirrors were the key: they could have created some sort of new mirror-orientated villain. There could even have been series potential in it! Just don't call it Poltergeist!

Director Gary Sherman also helmed the erotic thriller “Lisa”(1990) — not a great film by any means, but I have a weird fondness for it. Its opening music is very creepy, although when the saxophone hits it feels like a jazzy parody of Angelo Badalamenti.
I miss those seedy erotic thrillers from the 1980s and 1990s - all that Zalman King type stuff. I suppose it ties in with my adolescence!! While David Lynch was top dog with stuff like Blue Velvet, these lesser films lived somewhere in the same ballpark. I mean, I even have a soft spot for films such as Wild Orchid 2! In fact, Tom Skerritt's jazz musician in that film and Bill Pullman's in Lost Highway blur together from that era. It's a shame Zalman King's films have disappeared from home media. Someone like Arrow ought to do a revival of those films on Blu-ray.

I love all that steamy Deep South erotica. It's probably why I like Mark Frost's Storyville too. While I'm on a guilty pleasures confession streak, I also liked The Hunger TV series and The Red Shoe Diaries. I've never seen it, but I'm sure I'd have liked Femme Fatales too!! Doubtless more refined readers will want me condemned to the outer darkness now and never read another thing I write!! :D
 
Last edited:
Has anybody watched Lost River? It’s a movie directed by Ryan Gosling and has a lot of Lynch vibes. Almost all the reviews compared it with Lynch’s works


I have, loved it, a criminally overlooked directorial debut by Ryan Gosling, of all
people (and didn’t he write it as well?)! A pure example of style over substance, but in a good way! The atmosphere is at once oppressive and wistful,audio-visuals extinguished, the baddies make your skin crawl, and a cameo by genre icon Barbara Steele as well! And how about that singing number by Ben Mendelsohn!

Besides Lynch, I’d compare the general feeling to the one generated by Philip Ridley’s excellent The Reflecting Skin and maybe Gilliam’s Tideland. I hope Gosling isn’t scared off by the film’s lukewarm reception for good - I’d love to see him direct again!
 
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4K has been announced for later this year! Wonderful! I hope Warner don't mess this up and that we don't get any disc rot! Hopefully they'll get a move on with the sequels. I was hoping someone like Arrow and Shout! Factory would team up for this.

The current steelbook on pre-order is too expensive for me really, but I've gone ahead and I can always cancel later on.
 
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4K has been announced for later this year! Wonderful! I hope Warner don't mess this up and that we don't get any disc rot! Hopefully they'll get a move on with the sequels. I was hoping someone like Arrow and Shout! Factory would team up for this.

The current steelbook on pre-order is too expensive for me really, but I've gone ahead and I can always cancel later on.
I got their The Fugitive 4k and it looks fantastic
 
I got their The Fugitive 4k and it looks fantastic
Yeah, the issue is that Warners have a significant disc rot problem with their 4Ks. My copy of Tenet is already discolouring. The other is that Warner - as opposed to Warner Archive - don't have good knowledge of their archive.

The current version of A Nightmare on Elm Street on DVD and Blu-ray is the cut MPAA R-rated version. Internationally, a longer cut was the standard. Seeing Tina's murder diminished at the end of the scene was disappointing after the version I always knew - the one I had on 18-rated VHS back in the 1990s. There were also other little bits trimmed throughout the film.



There's no mention whether they're releasing the full cut or not. One wonders whether they're even aware the cut exists, given everyone linked to New Line left long ago. Warner Archive or one of the boutique labels would know about these things.
 
Last edited:
Francis Ford Coppola has started a YouTube channel and has posted a clip from his film Megalopolis, dedicated to his wife Eleanor (Hearts of Darkness) who died last month at the age of 87.



Hmm. Not because of the clip, but anyone else worried this will be bad? Anybody seen Twixt? Has Coppola made a good film in decades? Genuinely asking. I say this as someone who likes Godfather 3.
 
Hmm. Not because of the clip, but anyone else worried this will be bad? Anybody seen Twixt? Has Coppola made a good film in decades? Genuinely asking. I say this as someone who likes Godfather 3.
I have no idea. I mean, Coppola is always interesting: he always tries new things and he sometimes fails. He once remarked that he's not naturally gifted at filmmaking: he has to work at it. I feel like he 'blew a fuse' making Apocalypse Now and never entirely recovered from it!

I admit that the last Coppola film I watched (in terms of his chronology) was Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I love and saw in the same era as FWWM, which means it's rather bound up in that strange, but magical year for me (I went through a traumatic time around then.) It was the first 4K disc I ever bought. I've obviously watched plenty of earlier Coppola films in the last 32 years!!

He's done a bunch of 'George Lucas-ing' too. I wasn't impressed with Apocalypse Now Redux. It was a diluted version of the 1979 film, which remains one of my most beloved films. The Final Cut, which I have yet to watch, might be mercifully shorter, but the Playboy bunnies were the least of my problems with Redux. I've got The Cotton Club Encore, which my brother brought over from the USA, but haven't got around to watching it yet. I saw the theatrical version something like 30 years ago and I remember little of it. The Godfather Coda made a couple of improvements and many more mistakes.

I just don't know about Megalopolis. When a someone posted on LinkedIn that it was a disgrace that studios hadn't picked up the film after a screening, I got bollocked for suggesting that it might simply not be commercial (or good) enough. Certainly film journalists whom I'd expect to be cheerleading the film talked of the bafflement that accompanied the screening.

My reasoning on LinkedIn was that - as you say, Jordan - FFC hasn't made many films in the last 30+ years and several of the ones he has made notoriously haven't been great. I should probably try to see them, regardless, because critics and box office don't mean much to me. The Rainmaker, which was a work-for-hire ('one for them') film did fine in the box office and in reviews, but was hardly an 'auteur' film.

Megalopolis cost $120 million, which Coppola stumped up himself. Financing a film by yourself is fraught with risk - French music producer Laurent Boutonnat bankrupted himself and pretty much strangled what should have been a great film career at birth when he self-financed the movie Giorgino in the 1990s. It nearly wrecked the career of his protegé, Mylène Farmer, who starred in it, too.

A distributor will have to take on the marketing costs for a film that already cost a fortune, that it doesn't own, and take a major risk selling it to the public. Coppola wants to keep the film as is, so presumably the distributor won't be able to make alterations for different territories, as often happens. According to some of the reports, there's apparently a ton of graphic sex, including orgies, so it's looking at at least a US R rating and an 18 rating in the UK, which limits its marketability. And Coppola, in selling the distribution rights is going to want to make back a chunk of that mammoth $120 million upfront, which precludes smaller distributors from picking it up.

Unless it's something very commercial, people just won't take a risk on that sort of money. If David Lynch turns up with a $10 million film, chances are, someone will probably take it on. $120 million though? Trying to flog a film no one asked for is fraught with problems.
 
I’m excited for Megalopolis. I mean it’d be wonderful if it was a masterpiece three decades in the making, and it made up for all of Francis’ misfires and served as the final and most perfect artistic statement of a director who made his own rules and greatly expanded the scope and possibility of cinema…

But I don’t know, even if it ends up being the next Waterworld (or Heaven’s Gate), then at least the spectacle of it will be entertaining to some degree.
 
I’m excited for Megalopolis. I mean it’d be wonderful if it was a masterpiece three decades in the making, and it made up for all of Francis’ misfires and served as the final and most perfect artistic statement of a director who made his own rules and greatly expanded the scope and possibility of cinema…

But I don’t know, even if it ends up being the next Waterworld (or Heaven’s Gate), then at least the spectacle of it will be entertaining to some degree.
Agreed. And history has been kind to Waterworld and Heaven's Gate. They're in no way bad films. It was what they stood for in the business that damaged them. Coppola's always worth checking out. I'll go to see Megalopolis and buy the 4K for sure. Equally, I understand why distributors are leery of the film. My gut says there could end up being a wider-released truncated distributor's theatrical cut, then a director's cut on physical media that gets limited theatrical release.
 
Last edited:
Yeah, the issue is that Warners have a significant disc rot problem with their 4Ks. My copy of Tenet is already discolouring. The other is that Warner - as opposed to Warner Archive - don't have good knowledge of their archive.

The current version of A Nightmare on Elm Street on DVD and Blu-ray is the cut MPAA R-rated version. Internationally, a longer cut was the standard. Seeing Tina's murder diminished at the end of the scene was disappointing after the version I always knew - the one I had on 18-rated VHS back in the 1990s. There were also other little bits trimmed throughout the film.



There's no mention whether they're releasing the full cut or not. One wonders whether they're even aware the cut exists, given everyone linked to New Line left long ago. Warner Archive or one of the boutique labels would know about these things.

On a Wes Craven related note… Scream is missing a few seconds of footage here and there. There was briefly an unrated cut of the film floating around in the late 90s — it’s essentially the same film as the theatrical cut, except some of the gore shots are a bit longer, specifically Casey’s boyfriend’s demise in the beginning and Stu and Billy stabbing each other repeatedly in the finale.

It’s very strange that it’s so hard to find this version of the film. I’ve personally never come across it on physical media, but I remember ordering it on PPV back in the day.
 
Back
Top