Poltergeist III (1988)

After their experiences in Poltergeist II (which I’m not going to write up because I just can’t cope with quite this much Magical Native American), the Freelings must have turned into assholes, for they have left their ghost magnet daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) with her aunt Pat (Nancy Allen), her hubby, rich architect Bruce (Tom Skerritt) and Bruce’s daughter Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) in a high rise building in Chicago that is apparently some kind of arcology. Carol Anne is going to a school for talented but weird kids, where the chief psychologist, one doctor Seaton (Richard Fire), holds regular hypnosis sessions with her to prove that what happened in the first two movies was “mass hypnosis” somehow induced by Carol Anne. Which sounds even more ridiculous than poltergeists, so he at least deserves credits for countering the bat-shit insane with the even crazier.

Of course, the whole thing somehow calls back ole Reverend Henry Kane (Nathan Davis) and his crew of ghosts, who have suddenly developed the habit of exclusively centring their hauntings around mirrors, reflections, cold and evil doppelgangers. That’s going to become a bit of a problem, for Bruce’s high rise is hyper-modern and built in the 80s, therefore it is full of mirrors.

Gary Sherman’s Poltergeist III generally has a rather bad reputation but I enjoy it quite a bit more than the second film in the series. It’s not at all on the level of the original, of course, but at least the new things it is trying are more interesting than embarrassing, unlike what happens in film number two.

Characterisations aren’t terribly inventive – apart from the fact that Bruce who isn’t a blood relation clearly loves Carol Anne much more than the sister of her mother does. Pat learning to love the girl despite Carol Anne’s intrinsic weirdness (which you can read as a metaphor for illness or disability, if you’re so minded) is actually pretty much what part of the film seem to want to be about but the final twenty minutes of Poltergeist III are such a chaos of bad writing, characters saying and doing things that make no sense whatsoever, and plain bullshit that there’s no real pay off to the theme.

What does pay off, and what makes the first hour of the film worth watching quite a bit, is how much of a master class on building a variety of supernatural phenomena out of a small number of things – reflections and cold – it is. While there’s more than enough diversity to the phenomena to avoid boring anyone through repetition, they clearly belong to the same supernatural theme where quite a few horror films would just randomly throw supposedly spooky stuff at the audience. The feel of connection between various weirdnesses here is quite effective, and some of them make for really trippy and original little shocks and twists.

Until the film suddenly goes to a bizarre encounter in a frozen parking garage, one of the most stupid fake happy ends in horror history in which I have no idea why the characters are suddenly supposed to believe that things are over, not to speak of the audience, and a series of final set pieces and dialogue sequences that seem to have little connection to what came before, and which are probably the fault of your usual “troubled production history”.

Which puts Poltergeist III into the rubric of interesting but annoyingly flawed films worth watching for the good in them.

Some Thoughts About Poltergeist (1982)

Well, I think I can spare us any words about the plot here. After all, if you’re reading this, you’ve most certainly seen the film.

For quite some time, I’ve never really given Poltergeist much of a chance. Sure I’ve enjoyed it when I was a kid, but afterwards, a degree of dislike for its approach to horror as a carnivalesque special effects spectacular and a whole dollop of grumpy prejudice left me with a very cynical view of it, or of what it turned into in my mind. As is rather too often the case with me for comfort, I was wrong and unfair about Poltergeist. Fortunately, a recent rewatch of the painfully bland remake did make me curious about trying the original again, and watching it rather changed my mind.

Sure, I was right about Poltergeist in so far that it is indeed a film very much rooted in spooking its audience with its special effects – some of which still look brilliant to my eyes, some of which have dated as badly as CGI from the year 2001 – but it goes about it the honest way, certainly throwing something cool to look at on the screen every five minutes but also realizing special effects – even great ones – are not the only thing you need to catch an audience, and if you want to spook it for more than a few minutes, you’ll need to build an emotional connection.

The Hooper/Spielberg (how much of this is actually directed by Hooper and how much by the nominal producer Spielberg depends on whom you ask – at least some of the lighting and the sense of humour feel very much like a product of Hooper to me) film goes about creating this connection rather more subtly and rather less saccharine than Spielberg of this era is generally given credit for. The Freeling family is of course meant as an ideal identification foil for the film’s presumed white upper middle-class 80s audience, but the filmmakers are intelligent enough to realize that audiences might ask for representation but when it comes down to it, they’ll actually empathize with specific characters that are more than pure stand-ins for abstract notions quite a bit more. Consequently, the film puts a heavy emphasis on the way particularly the parents interact with one another, an - often quite funny – natural closeness that, together with fine and highly sympathetic performances by Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, presents the couple as the proverbial Good Parents, but also as people with flaws and difficulties who bicker sometimes, roll up a joint (or read up on Ronald Reagan) or make bad jokes in front of a mirror. In other words, characters whose troubles an audience can be interested in not because they are exactly like them (whatever that’d look), but because they feel like actual people. Compare that to the remake that doesn’t even manage to get any kind of personality out of Sam Rockwell.

Thusly prepared, the horrors of losing a child, encountering the supernatural and losing quite a few of the outer determinants of the Freeling’s as members of the upper middle-class during the course of the film, take on a much more affecting face, what could be an empty special effects extravaganza turning into a film that can actually touch you emotionally. Poltergeist’s considerable impact is further strengthened by some fine supporting performances. The child actors are merely okay (but they’re not horrible, with is the only thing I really demand of acting children, because they are children), but Beatrice Straight as parapsychologist Dr. Lesh sells some of the more problematic exposition with a great impression of human warmth and dignity, and Zelda Rubinstein is just perfect as Tangina, a character that’s a genuine weirdo the film still – or even because of that - portrays with great warmth and without any irony, leaving sceptical me very okay with a character I should hate with all the energy of a hundred burning suns (compare with the insufferable holier than thou Warrens in the similar in approach but to me completely ineffective The Conjuring films).

That the film looks fantastic (the lighting often is just outright beautiful), and that Hooper/Spielberg (Hooperberg? Spieler?) know how to pace a movie perfectly hardly needs a mention.

In short: Anguish (1987)

Original title: Angustia

Ophthalmologist's assistant John (Michael Lerner) is losing his eyesight and his mind. Assisted and/or hindered through the hypnotic influence of his mother (Zelda Rubinstein), John begins to remove the eyes of various unwilling donors. His killing spree eventually leads John into a movie theatre where he goes to work with particular relish. However, the mommy's boy and his serial killer habit are only a movie inside of a movie.

Teenage girls Patty and Linda (Talia Paul and Clara Pastor) are sitting in their own movie watching John's, but their mix of popcorn-munching and naked panic in reaction to the peculiar happenings on screen - respectively - is just the beginning, for someone starts killing off the patrons of their cinema, though in a less sexy style than John is using. The borders between movies, or between movie and reality, become exceedingly porous for everyone involved.

Spanish director Bigas Luna's Anguish is a fascinating movie, and one of the most interesting and successful attempts at that whole "horror movie inside of a horror movie" thing. When films go as meta as this one does, they sometimes tend to put too large of an emphasis on the ironic or the satirical elements, leaving any chance of an emotional connection (and I do think a film absolutely needs this kind of connection as much as it needs an intellectual one) with its audience by the wayside.

Anguish for its part works on all levels it reaches for at once. Taken completely at face value, it's two fantastic thrillers at once - the eyeball killer one a giallo style experience in exciting weirdness, the other one a more naturalistic piece made with the same expertise and sense of style. Yet it's also a film which questions even the realism of its supposedly realistic parts, permanently asking questions about not just the nature of reality, the nature of realism, the influence of movies on reality (which of the two movies we see is really mirroring which?), but also the question if the per definition more realistic also is the more real. After all, these borders tend to blur when the murderer of one movie kills for the approval of the mother of the other movie's murderer, even more so once it becomes quite unclear if the first movie's murderer doesn't have the ability to enter the second one, though he might do so only in a character's mind. And that's before we come to the ending titles where another movie audience watches said titles. It's all rather complex, and yet Luna never loses control over his material, with every (stylish, brilliant) shot clearly made for a reason.

On another level, Anguish is also a film about the power of the Weird over mainline reality. This aspect of the movie is perfectly incorporated in Rubinstein's performance. Her character, in all her ambiguous oddness, has no trouble drifting through the movie screen into the minds of the audience (both the real and the imagined one), changing the reality of those she comes in contact with in one way or the other. It is after all the nature of the Weird to infect reality until ideas of order, of cause and effect begin to disappear.

This moment when the quotidian transforms (deforms?), is what Anguish is all about for me; that it's also a great meta-thriller is nearly beside the point.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,in short,horror,bigas luna,zelda rubinstein,michael lerner