Poltergeist III (dir. Gary Sherman, 1988)
Another element of the curse: Poltergeist III is pretty dumb. The premise: It’s been a few years. Carol-Anne (O’Rourke) has been moved to her aunt and uncle’s high rise apartment in Chicago. The rest of the family is not in this film. Carol-Anne’s aunt and uncle are played by Nancy Allen and Tom Skerritt. Her teenage cousin Donna is played by Lara Flynn Boyle. She is attending a school for mentally-traumatized-yet-still-gifted children. This is a new wrinkle. Not only is Carol-Anne very intelligent, but she also is credited for having psychic gifts. This may have been why Kane was stalking her in the last film, and why he reappears in this one to finish the job. Kane is now only an apparition that appears in mirrors, and is played by Nathan Davis.
The principal of Carol-Anne’s school is named Dr. Seaton (which sounds like “Dr. Satan”) and is played by screenwriter Richard Fire, who wrote Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. He posits that Carol-Anne is psychically influencing people, and that there are no ghosts. He’s kind of a dummy.
Poltergeist III takes place mostly over the course of one evening in that sterile skyscraper apartment building. Skerritt and Allen go to a party in the lobby, hot cousin goes to a party, and Carol-Anne is left alone to be sucked into a ghost dimension once again. Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) senses all this, and arrives to help out.
The ghost effects are clearly not as sophisticated this time around, but they are still pretty neat. There is a lot of play with mirrors and backward images, and reflections that are only seen on one side of a mirror. This is cool: The mirror effects seem to have been done with building “reversed” sets and using body doubles rather than using in-camera effects. This allowed the camera to zoom in and out on an altered “reflection” which was, in fact, an extended set made to look like a reflection.
Kane steals Carol-Anne, and eventually it comes down to Nancy Allen to rescue her. Allen referred to Carol-Anne as a “brat” throughout the film, but eventually comes around, admits that she loves Carol-Anne, and defeats the evil Kane with family powers. There is a dropped subplot about how Donna and her would-be boyfriend Scott are sucked into the ghost dimension briefly, only to be released, possessed by evil. Donna springs out of the rotting corpse of Tangina’s body (WHICH IS PRETTY AWESOME). Yes, Tangina dies rather unceremoniously in an elevator in this film. Kane turns her into a mummy. Maybe the possessed teens were to be in the unmade Poltergeist IV?
A few people have noticed how many proper names are spoken aloud in this film. It’s an odd detail, but the screenwriter was sure to repeat the characters’ names (especially Carol-Anne’s) over and over and over. Watch this supercut made by a friend of mine called “Who, Dammit, Who?”. A solid 5% of the film is nothing but character’s names. It’s astonishing. It’s something that even Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert noticed in their review.
