Poltergeist II: The Other Side Year: 1986 Director: Brian Gibson Written by: Mark Victor, Michael Grais Threat: Evil spirit Weapon of Choice: Looooove IMDb page:

Other movies in this series:
Poltergeist
Poltergeist III

Rish's Reviews
I haven't seen this flick since its original release. It was one I anticipated a great deal after seeing what was to me, the coolest trailer ever made (a room of toys that come to life and Carol Anne answering her toy phone, then saying, "They're baaaaaack" to the camera). As usual, my parents would not take me to see this (to this day Orca the Killer Whale is the only horror film they ever took me to), but I got it the week it came out on video. I guess that makes it somewhere around seventeen years since I saw it. Ahh, old age.
The Other Side continues the tale of the Freeling family, a year after the events of the first film (even though it was shot three years later and came out a year after that). Well, the troublesome spirits track down the family who is staying with Grandma, really obsessed with recapturing little Carol Anne now that she has telepathic abilities. Oh, and Grandma does too. And Mom. With the help of a friendly indian mystic (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's Will Sampson), the family battles the forces of the dead, now personified by the evil Reverend Kane.
While not a terrible film, not at all, the film's greatest enemy is that it's a sequel to a modern classic. Poltergeist I was, in my humble opinion, the best haunted house film ever made, with a top-notch family dynamic, pacing, musical score, attitude, sense of humor, special effects, and and some of the world's best child acting, by the greatest director of children ever, Steven Spielberg. The sequel just pales in comparison. The scares work less often, the dialogue is often quite bad, the story itself is fragmented and illogical, and the overall feel of the film just isn't right.
I really wonder how the Spielbergless Jaws 2 managed to be as good as it was.
Written by the two non-Spielberg writers of the original, some of the elements are here again, but most of the inspiration seems to be missing. Pretty much everybody (living) in the cast comes back for the sequel. Zelda Rubinstein reappears, but has little to do, and is almost totally ineffectual, whereas she was the scientific and intellectual centre of the original. Poor woman. Even beautiful little Heather O'Rourke, so precocious and natural in the original sounds like she's reading lines when they're as simple as "It's okay, Mommy."
A couple of the scares do work, and the scene where the father is possessed is pretty effective. The old school special effects, done with affection by Industrial Light and Magic, were surprisingly dated, and even hokey at times. I never thought I'd say that.
The ending is very weak, probably the weakest part of the movie. The Indian hocum is simply laughable and it's hard not to groan at the talk of love being strong enough to defeat the evil one (not because it's a ridiculous notion, but because it's a delicate one). The reveal of "the other side" (wisely avoided in the original) is sadly genuinely ridiculous.
The film does have three saving graces that keep it from being an awful movie (which I believe the next sequel genuinely qualifies for), which are Craig T. Nelson's able performance as Steven Freeling (which JoBeth Williams, though capable, doesn't quite match this time around), Jerry Goldsmith's score (which repeats the main theme from the original as well as a creepy chanted Mormon hymn, but again, is not as effective as the first time), and sickly, hollow-faced Julian Beck as the thoroughly-chilling Reverend Kane. Oh, and Carol Anne has an E.T. The Extra-terrestrial poster on her wall. Neat.
The Other Side is mostly a forgettable film, and is really only brought up when people are talking about "The Poltergeist Curse," which, if you can recall, was around even before this movie came out. Stories of unnatural occurrences, disturbing sensations, mysterious accidents, and the like surrounded the making of this film and its sequel. Most notable were the deaths of three of the film series's major players: Dominick Dunne, Julian Beck, and little Heather O'Rourke. But hey, you probably knew all that.
Best Scare: During the formative days of this website, I considered suggesting a Skull for things showing up in mirrors (not sure why we didn't use it, come to think of it). This film has one of the most effective mirror scares I've ever seen, mostly because we are distracted by the annoyingly bad acting of the two child stars right before we see a bunch of rotting corpses reaching out for them. It worked well when I was a kid, and it spooked me just us much today.
I'd Recommend It To: Real fans of the original and Eighties special effects Horror.
Posted: March 14, 2005

Total Skulls: 19

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?