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.
P
oltergeist 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.