Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.
Talk to most any horror nerd and you’ll get a great deal of love for Poltergeist, one of the best arguments that making a good, scary PG movie is entirely possible. You won’t get a great deal of love for the sequels, making the Poltergeist trilogy the Matrix trilogy of the ‘80s—great first movie, and then straight down hill. But Poltergeist II: The Other Side was available to me, and I’d seen the pictures of the skeleton-faced dude enough times to think I knew what I was in for. And, boy, was I wrong.
Poltergeist II: The Other Side picks up about a year after the end of the first film despite the fact that a good four years have passed in reality and the kids are noticeably three or four years older than they were in the first film. Four of the five Freelings—father Steven (Craig T. Nelson), mother Diane (JoBeth Williams), middle child Robbie (Oliver Robins), and youngest child Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) have moved to Phoenix and are living with Diane’s mother, Jess (Geraldine Fitzgerald). The oldest child Dana (Dominique Dunne) was likely to have been written out of this film anyway, but could not be included since the actress was murdered by her boyfriend shortly after the release of the original film.
