Poltergeist III Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Poltergeist III Blu-ray Movie Review

The Towering Scarecrow

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 22, 2015

As a tie-in to its Memorial Day release of the Poltergeist remake, MGM is releasing the sequels to the 1982 original on Blu-ray, both individually and as a double feature. Poltergeist II: The Other Side was quietly issued in 2011, first as a Best Buy exclusive, then in general distribution. Poltergeist III is being released for the first time. Completists and the curious can now own the full trilogy, but P3 is by far the weakest of the lot. Underbudgeted, missing most of the original cast and straining for a premise to connect it to the first two films, P3 lacks any of the emotional heft that gave substance to the scares of the first two films. Director Gary Sherman, who also co-wrote the script after original writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor declined to return, was reduced to having characters shriek out each other's names repeatedly. Critic Roger Ebert reported that the audience at his screening began screaming names derisively back at the screen. Even today it's hard to avoid the temptation in the privacy of one's own media room.

The release of P3 was clouded by the death at age 12 of star Heather O'Rourke shortly after principal photography. O'Rourke had been ill during production, and she was prescribed cortisone for what was misdiagnosed as Krohn's disease, which is why her cheeks appear puffy in the film. In fact, she suffered from intestinal stenosis, which caused death from septic shock and cardiac arrest on February 1, 1988, during emergency surgery. The film is dedicated to her memory, and promotion was muted so that the studio would not appear to be taking advantage of a tragedy, which cemented the legend of a Poltergeist "curse", because a cast member had died after production on each film. (But in the case of Poltergeist II's Julian Beck, this was hardly a surprise, since his cancer was far advanced when he played the part of Reverend Kane.)

P3 was a critical and box office failure. The franchise was effectively finished as a film series, although Sherman would go on to help produce the Showtime series, Poltergeist: The Legacy, which had little in common with the film trilogy beyond the name.

In an effort to inject novelty into the franchise, P3 is set in a Chicago skyscraper loosely modeled on Water Tower Place, which combines an indoor mall, apartments and a restaurant on the top floor. The building has only recently opened, and a full-time engineering staff headed by Bruce Gardner (Tom Skerritt) is working out the inevitable kinks. Bruce is newly married to Pat (Nancy Allen), who is still adapting to her role as stepmother to Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle), Bruce's teenage daughter from his first marriage. On top of that, Pat owns an art gallery in the new building and is preparing for a big opening. The last thing she needs is the added pressure of taking care of her ghost-whispering niece, Carol Anne Freeling (O'Rourke).

The script for P3 doesn't offer any explanation for why Steven and Diane Freeling would send their beloved daughter to stay with her aunt and uncle. Maybe the writers preferred not to dwell on the thought, because it's almost impossible to imagine the couple we met in the first two films letting their youngest out of their sight after nearly losing her twice to angry spirits. But here's Carol Anne, learning how to dress for winter in Chicago, surrounded by people who don't believe in poltergeists, clairvoyance or the great beyond. The Gardners have even enrolled Carol Anne in a special school for "troubled" children, where the head shrink, Dr. Seaton (Richard Fire), rationalizes paranormal events as products of Carol Anne's ability to induce "mass hypnosis" in the people around her. He even attributes extraordinary instances of telekinesis to post-hypnotic suggestions carried out by bystanders who don't recall what they did. (Now there's a plausible alternative.)

According to psychic-on-call Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein, the only other returning cast member from the previous films besides O'Rourke), Dr. Seaton's insistent probing of Carol Anne's memories summons the ghost of the fearsome Reverend Henry Kane, her tormentor from Poltergeist II (but played here by Nathan Davis and voiced by Corey Burton, who looped many of Kane's lines in the previous film). Tangina's powers allow her to sense the danger from afar, and she rushes to Chicago bearing a necklace given to her by Taylor, the powerful Native American medicine man in Poltergeist II. By then, however, the situation is already dire.

Kane and his spirit followers are utilizing mirrors and other reflective surfaces to stalk Carol Anne, and the device of a reflection that opens into another world provides the film's best moments, as director Sherman achieves some startling "in camera" effects. Unfortunately, Sherman's efforts to link these effects to the larger Poltergeist mythology of spirits passing into "the light" are haphazard at best, and additional stunts involving icy conditions that materialize from nowhere and killer cars in the building's garage feel like random events pulled from a generic list of movie jeopardies. None of these risks has any substance, because P3 lacks the connection among family members in the face of shared danger that was carefully established during the first hour of the original Poltergeist. Some small opportunity for connection exists when Donna and a classmate with a crush on her, Scott (Kip Wentz), are dragged into Kane's world, but Sherman tosses away the dramatic potential for the sake of short-term shock effects. (He also tosses away Scott. At the end of the film, ask yourself what became of him.)

Nancy Allen has given fine performances for Brian De Palma and in the Robocop films, but in the finale of P3, when it falls to Aunt Pat to plunge into the abyss to rescue Carol Anne from Kane one more time, Allen has to deliver laughable dialogue that even Meryl Streep couldn't make credible. By the end of the movie, even Kane is laughing at the whole affair.

Poltergeist III Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Poltergeist III was shot by Russian cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy (Safe). MGM's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is a respectable catalog effort, with sharpness and detail that are good enough that one can appreciate the limits of the "demon" makeup applied to certain characters to transform them into threatening alternate versions. The color palette favors blues, whites and grays, probably to emphasize the warmth that makes Carol Anne so attractive to Kane, which is why she is typically associated with red. Indeed, in parts of P3, Carol Anne is little more than a fleeting red figure glimpsed in the distance by her family (which is probably an intentional homage to Don't Look Now).

The source material has minor flaws but nothing serious. The film's grain pattern is finely rendered and doesn't appear to have suffered any undue electronic manipulation. Where some studios might have crunched this 98-minute film onto a BD-25, MGM and its current distributor, Fox, have placed it on a BD-50, resulting in an average bitrate of 29.99 Mbps. The extra bandwidth is no doubt one reason for the superior reproduction, and it certainly accounts for the lack of artifacts.

Poltergeist III Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

P3 was released to theaters in Dolby Stereo and was issued in Dolby Digital 2.0 on DVD in 2003. For Blu-ray, it has been remixed in 5.1 and encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. The remix provides a solid bottom to some of the ghostly shenanigans—the elevator hijinks and parking lot skirmishes are especially effective—and the discrete format makes the original stereo separations even more distinct, particularly when Kane's voice cycles from one side to another. Glass breaks loudly, and screams are hearty. The dialogue is always clear, except for Kane's howls, which I suspect were not meant to be understood. The production could not afford Jerry Goldsmith, who scored the first two films; so it had to settle for Joe Renzetti, who scored director Sherman's Dead & Buried and would later score Child's Play. His score is capable and, if the film were better, would do the job admirably.

Poltergeist III Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Other than a trailer (1080p; 1.85:1; 1:05), which is little more than a teaser, the disc has no extras.

It should be noted, however, that after years of MGM catalog releases without a main menu or bookmarking, this release has both. These simple additions make the P3 Blu-ray far more user-friendly than most of MGM's catalog output to date. I hope whoever is making these mastering decisions continues with this approach.

Poltergeist III Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Director Gary Sherman will probably be best remembered for two films he made before Poltergeist III: the cult horror classic Dead & Buried (1981) and the lurid exploitation thriller Vice Squad (1982). In both instances, Sherman had the advantage of starting fresh, rather than being burdened with the task of reinvigorating a franchise under constraints that made the job virtually impossible. As I indicated at the outset, completists and the curious now have the opportunity to acquire P3 in a decent presentation. Otherwise, not recommended.