There’s a terrible truth I’ve discovered while revisiting movies from my childhood: nostalgia is often just sadness wearing a really cool T-shirt.
Sometimes you revisit a movie you loved decades ago and discover that it holds up beautifully. Other times, you realize that the memories were considerably better than the movie itself. It’s like Fruit Stripe gum. You get about 30 seconds of glorious, sugary happiness before you’re left chewing a soggy, flavorless wad of disappointment.
Welcome to POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE, a movie that sucks on uncountable levels of ass.
As I continue my cinematic journey through the decades, I’ve arrived at 1986. And since we’re closing in on Halloween, what better way to celebrate than revisiting a sequel to one of the great horror movies of the 1980s?
Well, apparently there are about 10,000 better ways.
They’re Back. Unfortunately.
Released on May 23, 1986, POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE arrived four years after Tobe Hooper’s POLTERGEIST terrified audiences and turned a little blonde girl announcing “They’re here” into one of the most iconic moments in horror history.
The original was a remarkable combination of suburban family drama, supernatural horror, and Steven Spielberg’s particular brand of cinematic magic. Spielberg produced and co-wrote the film, and his fingerprints were all over it. The Freeling family felt like an actual family. Their home felt like an actual home. And when everything went to hell, you genuinely cared whether these people survived.
That movie was scary. Really scary. It also had heart, humor, and an understanding of what made its characters worth rooting for.
The sequel has some of the same actors.
That’s about where the similarities end.
And can we talk about the tagline? The original gave us “They’re here.” Three little words that became part of the cultural vocabulary.
The sequel?
“They’re back.”
Wow. Chills. Somebody call the Academy.
Once you’ve announced that they’re here, telling us they’re back carries roughly the same dramatic weight as somebody returning to Costco because they forgot the toilet paper.
The Freelings Should Have Changed Their Phone Number
The movie picks up roughly a year after the original, with the Freeling family still recovering from that unfortunate incident involving their house being swallowed by another dimension.
Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson), his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams), their son Robbie (Oliver Robins), and daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) are now living with Diane’s mother, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald.
You’d think surviving a supernatural apocalypse would earn this family a lifetime exemption from paranormal activity.
Nope.
It turns out the evil spirits from the first movie haven’t finished tormenting Carol Anne. The source of the haunting is now revealed to be a deranged 19th-century preacher named Henry Kane (Julian Beck), who led his followers into an underground cavern to await the end of the world.
Spoiler alert: the world didn’t end.
The cult members did.
Now Kane and his followers are trapped in the spiritual equivalent of a really unpleasant homeowners association, and they’ve decided Carol Anne is their ticket to salvation.
Helping the Freelings are returning psychic Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein) and a Native American spiritual guide named Taylor (Will Sampson). Together, they attempt to protect the family from Kane’s increasingly aggressive attempts to cross over from the other side.
There’s some business with a magical spear, a possessed tequila worm, a chainsaw, and an alternate dimension that looks like somebody dumped a bucket of leftover visual effects into a blender.
In other words, it’s a mess.
Craig T. Nelson, What the Hell Are You Doing?
One of the great strengths of the original POLTERGEIST was Craig T. Nelson’s performance as Steve Freeling. He was funny, relatable, protective, and believable as a suburban dad whose entire understanding of the universe had been turned upside down.
I have no idea what happened between 1982 and 1986.
Watching Nelson in POLTERGEIST II is like watching somebody simultaneously phone in a performance and overact so aggressively that he might pull a hamstring.
I genuinely can’t tell if he didn’t give a shit or if he was trying way too hard.
Yowza.
Every emotional beat seems dialed up to eleven. Every outburst feels like it belongs in a completely different movie. And the chemistry that made the Freeling family so endearing the first time around is almost entirely missing.
JoBeth Williams fares better, largely because she seems to understand that the movie doesn’t need everyone performing like they’ve just discovered a family of raccoons living inside their underwear.
Heather O’Rourke remains adorable as Carol Anne, but there’s only so much a child actor can do when the screenplay keeps recycling the same supernatural nonsense.
I’ll go one further: I was actively rooting for the evil spirits.
Not because Kane was especially compelling.
I just wanted somebody to put this movie out of its misery.
The Preacher, the Hat, and Those Gigantic Teeth
To be fair, POLTERGEIST II does have one genuinely memorable creation: Reverend Henry Kane.
Julian Beck’s gaunt, skeletal appearance is deeply unsettling, and his repeated rendition of “God Is in His Holy Temple” is easily the creepiest thing in the movie.
But let’s discuss the rest of this guy.
Kane wanders around looking like a social media influencer who recently decided he might be a rancher. You know the type. Big hat. Vaguely Western aesthetic. Probably selling supplements or explaining why he bought 40 acres of land despite never having owned a shovel.
When Kane shows up at the front door, slowly singing his creepy little hymn, I’m not so much frightened as I am expecting Chris Hansen to emerge from the kitchen and ask him to have a seat.
“You see how this looks, right?”
And yet, despite all my jokes, Beck deserves credit. His performance is easily the most disturbing thing about this otherwise toothless sequel.
There’s also a genuinely sad story behind it. Beck was battling stomach cancer during production and died in September 1985, months before the film opened. His frighteningly gaunt appearance was not simply the product of Hollywood makeup.
That knowledge gives his performance a haunting quality the rest of the movie desperately lacks.
Even H.R. Giger Couldn’t Save This Thing
Here’s something that makes the movie’s failure even more frustrating: the filmmakers hired H.R. Giger, the visionary artist responsible for the nightmarish creature designs in ALIEN, to help conceptualize the film’s supernatural horrors.
H.R. GIGER!
You’ve got the man who helped create one of the most terrifying monsters in cinematic history, and somehow the finished product still feels like a haunted-house attraction at a struggling county fair.
To be fair, there are a couple of impressive practical effects. Steve’s possessed tequila worm making its spectacularly disgusting return trip through his mouth is memorable, and some of the creature imagery is appropriately grotesque.
But the film mistakes visual spectacle for genuine horror.
The original understood that terror comes from anticipation, from the quiet moments before something terrible happens. The sequel seems convinced that if it throws enough supernatural goo at the screen, we’ll eventually become frightened.
We don’t.
We just become tired.
And here’s another interesting tidbit: the movie was reportedly much longer before being cut to its 91-minute theatrical version. Accounts of the production suggest that a substantial amount of footage, including additional character development and supernatural material, was removed.
Would a longer version have been better?
Maybe.
But when a movie is already this exhausting at 91 minutes, I’m not particularly interested in testing that theory.
Forty-One Million Dollars Worth of Nostalgia
Here’s the surprising part: POLTERGEIST II wasn’t exactly a box-office catastrophe.
The film opened on May 23, 1986, earning approximately $12.4 million during its opening weekend and eventually collecting just under $41 million domestically.
That’s not terrible, especially for a horror sequel in 1986.
But compared with the original POLTERGEIST, which earned nearly $75 million domestically, it’s a pretty significant drop.
Audiences were clearly interested in seeing the Freelings return.
They just didn’t keep coming back.
And really, can you blame them?
As of this writing, the movie carries a miserable 20% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Sometimes critics are wrong. Sometimes a movie gets unfairly beaten up.
This is not one of those times.
Spielberg, Thank You for Knowing When to Stop
Watching POLTERGEIST II reminded me of something I’ve always appreciated about Steven Spielberg.
He never made CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND 2.
He never made E.T. 2.
Thank the Lord.
Wait a minute. DISCLOSURE DAY…
Nope. Never mind. I’m not going there.
Spielberg understood, at least with those particular movies, that sometimes a story is finished. You don’t need to revisit every beloved character, reopen every mystery, or manufacture another adventure just because audiences have fond memories of the original.
Granted, Spielberg’s JAWS wasn’t spared the sequel treatment, and JAWS 2 is another abomination that never should have happened.
In fact, I’ll say something that might get my movie-critic card revoked:
JAWS 3-D is a better sequel than JAWS 2.
There. I said it.
At least JAWS 3-D knows it’s ridiculous. There’s something almost admirable about a movie willing to embrace its own stupidity.
POLTERGEIST II, on the other hand, desperately wants to convince us that it’s delivering another profound, emotionally resonant supernatural experience.
It’s not.
It’s just digging up a perfectly good movie to see if there’s any money left in the coffin.
The Awful Truth About Nostalgia
The older I get, the more I realize that nostalgia is a dangerous thing.
We tend to remember how movies made us feel rather than what those movies actually were. We remember the theater, the friends, the family, the time in our lives, and the excitement of seeing something new.
Sometimes those memories are better than the movies themselves.
I think I first started noticing this during the Ewok portions of RETURN OF THE JEDI. But that’s an entirely different article, and I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to litigate the Battle of Endor right now.
What makes revisiting something like POLTERGEIST II particularly disappointing is that I wanted to enjoy it.
I wanted to be transported back to 1986. I wanted the music, the scares, the familiar characters, and that wonderful feeling of rediscovering something from my childhood.
Instead, I got Fruit Stripe gum.
Thirty seconds of sugary nostalgia followed by an hour and a half of soggy disappointment.
The original POLTERGEIST remains one of the great horror films of the 1980s. It’s funny, frightening, heartfelt, and endlessly rewatchable.
Its sequel is none of those things.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of this little journey through the decades. Not everything we loved, or thought we loved, deserves to be revisited. Sometimes the best thing we can do is leave a happy memory exactly where we found it.
And sometimes, when the ghosts come back, the appropriate response isn’t to scream.
It’s to lock the damn door.
Next stop: 1996 and Peter Jackson’s THE FRIGHTENERS.
POLTERGEIST II (1986) Review: Nostalgia Bites Back
POLTERGEIST II (1986): They’re Back. Who Asked?
There’s a terrible truth I’ve discovered while revisiting movies from my childhood: nostalgia is often just sadness wearing a really cool T-shirt.
Sometimes you revisit a movie you loved decades ago and discover that it holds up beautifully. Other times, you realize that the memories were considerably better than the movie itself. It’s like Fruit Stripe gum. You get about 30 seconds of glorious, sugary happiness before you’re left chewing a soggy, flavorless wad of disappointment.
Welcome to POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE, a movie that sucks on uncountable levels of ass.
As I continue my cinematic journey through the decades, I’ve arrived at 1986. And since we’re closing in on Halloween, what better way to celebrate than revisiting a sequel to one of the great horror movies of the 1980s?
Well, apparently there are about 10,000 better ways.
They’re Back. Unfortunately.
Released on May 23, 1986, POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE arrived four years after Tobe Hooper’s POLTERGEIST terrified audiences and turned a little blonde girl announcing “They’re here” into one of the most iconic moments in horror history.
The original was a remarkable combination of suburban family drama, supernatural horror, and Steven Spielberg’s particular brand of cinematic magic. Spielberg produced and co-wrote the film, and his fingerprints were all over it. The Freeling family felt like an actual family. Their home felt like an actual home. And when everything went to hell, you genuinely cared whether these people survived.
That movie was scary. Really scary. It also had heart, humor, and an understanding of what made its characters worth rooting for.
The sequel has some of the same actors.
That’s about where the similarities end.
And can we talk about the tagline? The original gave us “They’re here.” Three little words that became part of the cultural vocabulary.
The sequel?
“They’re back.”
Wow. Chills. Somebody call the Academy.
Once you’ve announced that they’re here, telling us they’re back carries roughly the same dramatic weight as somebody returning to Costco because they forgot the toilet paper.
The Freelings Should Have Changed Their Phone Number
The movie picks up roughly a year after the original, with the Freeling family still recovering from that unfortunate incident involving their house being swallowed by another dimension.
Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson), his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams), their son Robbie (Oliver Robins), and daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) are now living with Diane’s mother, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald.
You’d think surviving a supernatural apocalypse would earn this family a lifetime exemption from paranormal activity.
Nope.
It turns out the evil spirits from the first movie haven’t finished tormenting Carol Anne. The source of the haunting is now revealed to be a deranged 19th-century preacher named Henry Kane (Julian Beck), who led his followers into an underground cavern to await the end of the world.
Spoiler alert: the world didn’t end.
The cult members did.
Now Kane and his followers are trapped in the spiritual equivalent of a really unpleasant homeowners association, and they’ve decided Carol Anne is their ticket to salvation.
Helping the Freelings are returning psychic Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein) and a Native American spiritual guide named Taylor (Will Sampson). Together, they attempt to protect the family from Kane’s increasingly aggressive attempts to cross over from the other side.
There’s some business with a magical spear, a possessed tequila worm, a chainsaw, and an alternate dimension that looks like somebody dumped a bucket of leftover visual effects into a blender.
In other words, it’s a mess.
Craig T. Nelson, What the Hell Are You Doing?
One of the great strengths of the original POLTERGEIST was Craig T. Nelson’s performance as Steve Freeling. He was funny, relatable, protective, and believable as a suburban dad whose entire understanding of the universe had been turned upside down.
I have no idea what happened between 1982 and 1986.
Watching Nelson in POLTERGEIST II is like watching somebody simultaneously phone in a performance and overact so aggressively that he might pull a hamstring.
I genuinely can’t tell if he didn’t give a shit or if he was trying way too hard.
Yowza.
Every emotional beat seems dialed up to eleven. Every outburst feels like it belongs in a completely different movie. And the chemistry that made the Freeling family so endearing the first time around is almost entirely missing.
JoBeth Williams fares better, largely because she seems to understand that the movie doesn’t need everyone performing like they’ve just discovered a family of raccoons living inside their underwear.
Heather O’Rourke remains adorable as Carol Anne, but there’s only so much a child actor can do when the screenplay keeps recycling the same supernatural nonsense.
I’ll go one further: I was actively rooting for the evil spirits.
Not because Kane was especially compelling.
I just wanted somebody to put this movie out of its misery.
The Preacher, the Hat, and Those Gigantic Teeth
To be fair, POLTERGEIST II does have one genuinely memorable creation: Reverend Henry Kane.
Julian Beck’s gaunt, skeletal appearance is deeply unsettling, and his repeated rendition of “God Is in His Holy Temple” is easily the creepiest thing in the movie.
But let’s discuss the rest of this guy.
Kane wanders around looking like a social media influencer who recently decided he might be a rancher. You know the type. Big hat. Vaguely Western aesthetic. Probably selling supplements or explaining why he bought 40 acres of land despite never having owned a shovel.
And the teeth!
Sweet baby Jebus, the teeth.
This guy has a mouthful of gigantic Joe Biden-style Chiclets that could light up a football stadium.
When Kane shows up at the front door, slowly singing his creepy little hymn, I’m not so much frightened as I am expecting Chris Hansen to emerge from the kitchen and ask him to have a seat.
“You see how this looks, right?”
And yet, despite all my jokes, Beck deserves credit. His performance is easily the most disturbing thing about this otherwise toothless sequel.
There’s also a genuinely sad story behind it. Beck was battling stomach cancer during production and died in September 1985, months before the film opened. His frighteningly gaunt appearance was not simply the product of Hollywood makeup.
That knowledge gives his performance a haunting quality the rest of the movie desperately lacks.
Even H.R. Giger Couldn’t Save This Thing
Here’s something that makes the movie’s failure even more frustrating: the filmmakers hired H.R. Giger, the visionary artist responsible for the nightmarish creature designs in ALIEN, to help conceptualize the film’s supernatural horrors.
H.R. GIGER!
You’ve got the man who helped create one of the most terrifying monsters in cinematic history, and somehow the finished product still feels like a haunted-house attraction at a struggling county fair.
To be fair, there are a couple of impressive practical effects. Steve’s possessed tequila worm making its spectacularly disgusting return trip through his mouth is memorable, and some of the creature imagery is appropriately grotesque.
But the film mistakes visual spectacle for genuine horror.
The original understood that terror comes from anticipation, from the quiet moments before something terrible happens. The sequel seems convinced that if it throws enough supernatural goo at the screen, we’ll eventually become frightened.
We don’t.
We just become tired.
And here’s another interesting tidbit: the movie was reportedly much longer before being cut to its 91-minute theatrical version. Accounts of the production suggest that a substantial amount of footage, including additional character development and supernatural material, was removed.
Would a longer version have been better?
Maybe.
But when a movie is already this exhausting at 91 minutes, I’m not particularly interested in testing that theory.
Forty-One Million Dollars Worth of Nostalgia
Here’s the surprising part: POLTERGEIST II wasn’t exactly a box-office catastrophe.
The film opened on May 23, 1986, earning approximately $12.4 million during its opening weekend and eventually collecting just under $41 million domestically.
That’s not terrible, especially for a horror sequel in 1986.
But compared with the original POLTERGEIST, which earned nearly $75 million domestically, it’s a pretty significant drop.
Audiences were clearly interested in seeing the Freelings return.
They just didn’t keep coming back.
And really, can you blame them?
As of this writing, the movie carries a miserable 20% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Sometimes critics are wrong. Sometimes a movie gets unfairly beaten up.
This is not one of those times.
Spielberg, Thank You for Knowing When to Stop
Watching POLTERGEIST II reminded me of something I’ve always appreciated about Steven Spielberg.
He never made CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND 2.
He never made E.T. 2.
Thank the Lord.
Wait a minute. DISCLOSURE DAY…
Nope. Never mind. I’m not going there.
Spielberg understood, at least with those particular movies, that sometimes a story is finished. You don’t need to revisit every beloved character, reopen every mystery, or manufacture another adventure just because audiences have fond memories of the original.
Granted, Spielberg’s JAWS wasn’t spared the sequel treatment, and JAWS 2 is another abomination that never should have happened.
In fact, I’ll say something that might get my movie-critic card revoked:
JAWS 3-D is a better sequel than JAWS 2.
There. I said it.
At least JAWS 3-D knows it’s ridiculous. There’s something almost admirable about a movie willing to embrace its own stupidity.
POLTERGEIST II, on the other hand, desperately wants to convince us that it’s delivering another profound, emotionally resonant supernatural experience.
It’s not.
It’s just digging up a perfectly good movie to see if there’s any money left in the coffin.
The Awful Truth About Nostalgia
The older I get, the more I realize that nostalgia is a dangerous thing.
We tend to remember how movies made us feel rather than what those movies actually were. We remember the theater, the friends, the family, the time in our lives, and the excitement of seeing something new.
Sometimes those memories are better than the movies themselves.
I think I first started noticing this during the Ewok portions of RETURN OF THE JEDI. But that’s an entirely different article, and I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to litigate the Battle of Endor right now.
What makes revisiting something like POLTERGEIST II particularly disappointing is that I wanted to enjoy it.
I wanted to be transported back to 1986. I wanted the music, the scares, the familiar characters, and that wonderful feeling of rediscovering something from my childhood.
Instead, I got Fruit Stripe gum.
Thirty seconds of sugary nostalgia followed by an hour and a half of soggy disappointment.
The original POLTERGEIST remains one of the great horror films of the 1980s. It’s funny, frightening, heartfelt, and endlessly rewatchable.
Its sequel is none of those things.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of this little journey through the decades. Not everything we loved, or thought we loved, deserves to be revisited. Sometimes the best thing we can do is leave a happy memory exactly where we found it.
And sometimes, when the ghosts come back, the appropriate response isn’t to scream.
It’s to lock the damn door.
Next stop: 1996 and Peter Jackson’s THE FRIGHTENERS.
Here’s hoping the next decade treats me better.