Poltergeist 2: The Other Side (1986)

After the events of the first film, the Freeling family is financially broke and shacking up with Diane’s (Jobeth Williams) mother. After Grandma dies, a creepy preacher named Kane shows up on the doorstep expressing a rather unnerving interest in little Carol Anne. Why unnerving you ask? Because he’s really the ghost of a preacher who led a mass Jim Jones styled suicide back in the day. Now he needs Carol Ann’s psychic power’s to lead him to the “other side”…or something like that. Yawn.

Ok, the entire cast returns from the first one, which is great. Poltergeist worked mainly because the acting was terrific, and the family was a believable unit that you actually felt sorry for when the ghostly shit hit the fan. Yet, somehow in this one it’s just not the same. Jobeth Williams is still hot and does well with the rather hokey-ass material she is given to feed off, and she gives the best performance in the movie. Craig T. Nelson overacts and his character is often drunk during the film’s events, but he does what he can do. His character does have one of the film’s lone highlights which I’ll elaborate on in a bit. Tangena (Zelda Rubenstein) also returns to amaze us with her ability to both over and under act…the less said of her the better. There is a new character introduced by the name of Taylor, an Indian medicine man who attempts to help the family fight the spooks, but he’s underused and inexplicably disappears half way through the movie. His character is there to basically bone up the whole Indian/spiritual/metaphysical concept the film try’s to portray but which really doesn’t work. Whoops. Heather O’Rourke and Oliver Robins return as Carol Anne and Robbie, though since they are older here I didn’t have as much sympathy for them. That’s not that their acting was bad, because it wasn’t, they just don’t generate the compassion that was garnered in the first film, and the movie suffers because of this. I actually cheered for the ghosts to get Robbie…jeez, how do I sleep at night?

In a sense, Poltergeist 2 can be summed up real neat and simple. It’s like the first one but nowhere near as good. It seems like whatever worked in the first film, the filmmakers just tried to rehash, with less than spectacular results. I was actually amazed at how bad this one was after all these years, and dare I say, it was even boring ay some points. Ghosts want Carol Anne; ghosts scare family while attempting to nab Carol Anne, blah, blah and blah. Insert a bunch of Indian spirituality/love conquers evil malarkey and you get one confused mess. Lone highlights include the late actor Julian Beck as the creepy ghost preacher Kane, especially the scene of him walking in the rain and singing his little religious tune. The guy was apparently in the last stages of stomach cancer during filming, and the disease actually enhances his performance...very effective. Amidst all the usual ghostly bugaboos, there is a scene that comes out of nowhere and really stuck in my mind years ago when I first saw this as a kid. After Craig Nelson downs a bottle of tequila, worm and all, he vomits said worm up which turns into a rather slimy and gross little demon monster. It’s actually sort of disturbing, and the rubber monster is fairly well designed. However, two highlights out of an hour and a half of crap just aren’t enough to save this one. Skip it.