Any sequel to any movie as bad as the original Poltergeist stands a good chance to beat the odds on so-called sequelitis. How could it be worse? But then again it could easily be as bad. You might have thought, in this particular case, that the Pandora's Box of evil spirits would have been somewhat depleted after the earlier effort, and that the filmmakers -- under the direction, this time, of someone called Brian Gibson -- would have been beneficially forced to narrow down their focus. Indeed they do single out for special attention a black-garbed, hymn-singing religious fanatic (played by Julian Beck as a paper-thin slice of ham) who walks around under his own personal rain cloud and is able to pass through solid objects -- but for some reason is blocked by an average American screen door. The pinpointing of an arch fiend does not stop the filmmakers from recycling a lot of desiccated skeletons and smoky ghosts and flashes of light and bumps in the night and whatnot. Nor from adding to the group such entities as an airborne chain saw, a set of dental braces that branch out into a sort of wire cocoon, or a gusano at the bottom of a mescal bottle which, after being swallowed, is regurgitated at roughly a thousand times its original size. An Indian medicine man lays out the battle plan for us: "Until we learn how to defeat him, we do not let him win." Uh-HUH. But clearly the primary malevolent force in the movie, as in the previous one, is simply an unrestricted special-effects department. Craig T. Nelson, Jobeth Williams, Will Sampson, Geraldine Fitzgerald. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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