31 of 31 Horror Films I Have Never Seen 2016: Poltergeist III (1988)

The third film of almost all trilogies seems to be cursed.  Take your pick of film series: Alien, Jurassic Park, Godfather, etc.  The third film never seems to perform as well in the box offices and usually gets panned by critics, whether deserving or not.  My theory on this is that the expectations of the audience for the third installment to live up to the first two is so great that the audience will likely dismiss it within the first act of the film on a subconscious level.  In most cases this seems to be fair as many of the third films in trilogies (assuming they don't become franchises) are storytelling disasters.  Decreased budgets, weak scripts, uninterested producing teams, you name it, at least one of these things will befall the third film of any trilogy.  Almost all three happened to Gary Sherman's Poltergeist III, but that was just the beginning.

Poltergeist III sees Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) removed from the suburbs and living with her Aunt Pat (Nancy Allen) and Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerritt) in a Chicago high rise that her Uncle happens to be the building manager of.  Her life with her extended family is idyllic and charming, but a sinister presence has found her once again and it will stop at nothing to get her.

This film could easily be called Carol Anne: The Movie just for the sheer number of times the characters call out her name.  I mean, shoddy writing is one thing, but apparently nowhere did anyone think that just screaming Carol Anne was a lazy way to convey hysteria.  Even with a great cast and crew this film suffers pretty badly from bad writing.  Gary Sherman's technical directing is the only thing that rises above the mud from all of this with incredible in camera effects rarely relying on post visual effects editing.  The gags (as they're called in the industry) never repeat themselves and push the unease to great level's but they're not distracting enough to make the audience forget how stunningly bad the film is.

It's not just that the film has a bad script, but Sherman's direction of the actors is incredibly uneven.  Tom Skerritt and Nancy Allen are so all over the place that it is only Zelda Rubinstein's cheese-ball seriousness that ever distracts from them.  The lousy performances are compounded by the uneven tone of the film.  I couldn't tell if Sherman was trying to play it straight or make a "party movie."  Decreased in budget, the film lost it's original composer, the incredible Jerry Goldsmith, and rather than trying to make a similar score Sherman and the producers went with this ultra cheesy synth score complete with annoying sound cues and hits to "heighten" the scares.  It doesn't work.  No matter how much I tried to give the film the benefit of doubt, it all boiled down to the repetitive feeling that everything going on was not working.  A bummer, but then again, the second film wasn't particularly great, though surprisingly successful.