Night 15 of 31 Nights of Horror

I want to start of by saying, the movie is not as bad as the Rotten Tomatoes score would indicate. I mean, it’s nowhere near as good as the first movie, but it’s not terrible. I think people were just disappointed when they compare it to the original, and they used the rating system to reflect that.

What went wrong with this movie? Well, nothing really, or maybe everything. You can’t say the effect were bad, they weren’t. You can’t say the acting was bad, it wasn’t. The story wasn’t terrible, although it was just a little harder to believe than the first one. I think it’s more about the crew behind the cameras, and how they changed almost everyone involved from the first except the cast, the head writers and Jerry Goldsmith.

Gone are Steven Speilberg and Tobe Hooper, which are probably the biggest changes and had the most impact, but it’s also a different cinematographer, different editor, producers, production designer, set decorator, makeup, when I compare IMDB credits side by side, not a single person in the art department was in both movies. Film-making is a collaborative effort and when you change so many of the people involved in it, you’re going to wind up with a very different outcome, even if you keep the same actors in front of the lens.

What would I have changed about this movie? If they were going to change so much of the crew, I hate to say it, but I would have changed the cast as well. Make a clean break. Make the story about a new family, maybe focus this time on the researchers going to a new house, or maybe put Tangina at the centre. More Zelda Rubinstein would have been a good thing in my opinion, she’s in far too little of this movie. As much as I loved the cast, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are great and Heather O’Rourke a treasure taken way too soon, it’s hard to believe *SPOILER ALERT* their house was built on a DOUBLE graveyard. Seriously? This type of movie requires some healthy suspension of disbelief already, but to ask people to buy that there was a cave with more bodies underneath the cemetery that was already hidden is pushing it in my opinion. Especially when you add that, not only is this family unlucky in where their home was built, but Diane, her mother and her daughter ALL have strong psychic abilities? Pick one, either the land is cursed or the people are the reason the poltergeists are attacking them and following them, asking us to believe both is a little too much for me.

Some of the world-building I didn’t buy into. The first one, the spirits were spirits, they acted by moving and possessing inanimate objects. In this one, there is a lot of physical manifestations. I get wanting Julian Beck in as many scenes as possible, he’s the best thing about this film, but if he can appear and walk around whenever he wanted, why did he need Carol Anne? It seemed like the effects people had cool ideas they wanted to try (the braces attacking Robbie, the mescal worm) and the writers found a way to try and work them into the story, instead of the effects being needed to tell the story.

I hate that is sounds like I’m bashing the movie, that’s not my intention, I think, like a lot of the people voting on RT, that I had such strong feelings about the first film, being let down by the sequel makes you just a little angry about what could have been.