Carol Anne has been sent to live with her Aunt and Uncle in an effort to
hide her from the clutches of the ghostly Reverend Kane, but he tracks
her down and terrorises her in her relatives' appartment in a tall glass
building. Will he finally achieve his target and capture Carol Anne
again, or will Tangina be able, yet again, to thwart him?
Poltergeist III is a 1988 American horror film and is the third and final entry in the original Poltergeist film series. Writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor,
who wrote the screenplay for the first two films, did not return for
this second sequel; it was co-written, executive produced, and directed
by Gary Sherman, and was released on June 10, 1988 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.
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| They're back... again. |
Staying in Chicago with relatives Bruce, (Tom Skerritt) and Patricia
Gardner, (Nancy Allen) and their daughter Donna, (Lara Flynn Boyle)
Carol Anne Freeling, (Heather O'Rourke) is trying to start life over
with a new family. Almost as soon as they get settled in with each
other, strange phenomena begin affecting the family at different
locations. They are misinterpreted by her school teachers as something
wrong with her, and think she needs to be treated accordingly. Carol
Anne was telling the truth, as Reverend Henry Kane, (Nathan Davis)
tracks her down and uses his spirits to help him.
Shitty little sequel filled with annoying characters and some horrible
dialog. Only Heather
O'rourke and Zelda Rubinstein are hold overs from
the
original cast. If O'rourke and Rubinstein were smart they would have
skipped participating in this bomb of a movie also. This movie suffers
from
a bad script and bad acting highlighted by the actor who plays Dr. Seaton,
who may have given the worst acting performance ever. I could get the guy up the street with the "I Will Work For Food Sign" to do a better job. There is a certain sadness in watching this film knowing that Heather
O'rourke died a few months before it's release. A double for Heather is
used to shoot the final scenes of the movie which creates an odd and
choppy
ending. To her credit though
she is the least annoying character in the movie as she is one of the few
who doesn't yell out "CAROL ANNE" one hundred times.
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| Please pull me out of this horrible film. |
The effects.....bad. There just are not the cool special effects from the previous
two
installments. Instead of ghosts we get killer cars and people who are
different in mirrors that kill people by pushing them down. The ending was disappointing; I would have preferred the original
ending. It's a real disappointment that it's impossible to see the
deleted scenes, including the original ending. Do not watch without consuming lots of alcohol. MGM put this out on DVD with part II, probably because they
thought (correctly) that no one would buy part III on its own.
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| Trapped in the limbo between life and death, there are only two ways out. |
Trivia:
In this film alone, Carol Anne's name is spoken a total of 121 times.
Following the death of Heather O'Rourke in February of 1988 after she finished her work on the film (April-June 1987), it was the decision of director Gary Sherman
to temporarily shelve the project during its post-production phase.
However, due to the amount of money that had already been spent, MGM
insisted that the film be finished and released as scheduled for June of
1988 or they would find someone else to do it. Apparently, after the
film was given a PG rating by the MPAA in November 1987, the studio had
already decided to have Sherman re-shoot the ending with more graphic
scenes, in order to "up" the rating to PG-13. Planning for this re-shoot
began in December 1987 and continued into January 1988, but was
temporarily put on hold when O'Rourke died Feb. 1. The re-shoot (which
used a stand-in for Heather) eventually took place in March, and the
film was then "re-edited" and given a PG-13 by the MPAA in April 1988.
Director Sherman would later claim that no such "re-shoot" took place,
instead insisting that Heather died before they could film the "original
ending" and that the current ending using the body double was what they
hastily threw together when forced to "finish" the film by MGM.
However, he is contradicted by at least six other people who also worked
on the film who confirmed that the original ending was in fact filmed
before Heather died and that the re-shoot of the ending took place after
her passing. These people include producer Barry Bernardi, actor Kipley Wentz, assistant editor Jeanne Bonansinga, composer Joe Renzetti, special effects makeup artist Doug Drexler and the man who provided the voice for the Rev. Kane, Corey Burton.
Lara Flynn Boyle's film debut.
At the beginning of the film, the characters mistakenly believe that the
weather outside is cold. When they descend from the upper floors to the
ground level however, they find that it is in fact quite warm. This
phenomenon of weather varying from the upper to lower floors actually
does occur at the Hancock Center due to the building's height. Residents
often call the lobby doormen before leaving their apartments to find
out what conditions are like at ground level.
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| He's found her. |
Zelda Rubinstein had to leave the production midway because of her mother's death.
Tom Skerritt makes a reference to Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) to Nancy Allen. This is presumably an in-joke, as Allen had starred in that film, as Chris Hargenson, back in 1976.
End credits explain that the role of Reverend Kane had originally been portrayed by Julian Beck.
After filming of the scene where the cars chase Patricia and Bruce, the
car's explosion set the entire set on fire, almost taking a crew member
and a few cameras he was rescuing. When Heather O'Rourke showed up for filming the next day and heard about the incident from director Gary Sherman, she was relieved that no one was hurt. She then asked Sherman, "Did you get the shot?"
Although much of the film is set in Chicago's John Hancock Center, the
shopping area and parking garage as seen in the film do not exist in the
Hancock Center. The shopping area (especially the escalators seen
immediately before the art gallery sequence) is across the street, in
the Water Tower Place shopping mall. The parking garage is definitely
not the Hancock Center's, it was filmed in a high rise dual tower
complex called "Oakbrook Terrace" in a suburb west of Chicago.
Although there was an internet rumor that Jerry Goldsmith
was originally contracted to score this film but quit due to budget
cuts (and then supposedly used his "unused" P3 score later in The Haunting (1999)), this rumor is untrue. Goldsmith was unhappy with the results of Poltergeist II: The Other Side
(1986) and did not have an interest in doing the third film. Also, it's
clear that MGM did not want to spend the extra money they knew it would
cost to hire Goldsmith, considering that "Poltergeist III" was being
made on a lower budget than the last film. Ultimately, "Poltergeist III"
was scored by Joe Renzetti, who director Gary Sherman recommended, having worked with Renzetti previously on his other low-budget movies.
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| Guess who's back in town. |
This is the only film in the original trilogy that did not receive any Oscar nominations. No shocker there.
Producer David E. Kelley has quite a connection to this film. He cast Tom Skerritt and Zelda Rubinstein in his Emmy-winning TV drama Picket Fences (1992) after seeing them together in this film. The character of Skerrit's daughter was played by Holly Marie Combs on the show. That character is reminiscent in character and physicality to Lara Flynn Boyle's character Donna Gardner in this film. Nancy Allen
was originally cast to portray the town's mayor in Season 2 of "Picket
Fences" but had to drop out due to her contractual obligations to appear
in RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993). That role was then filled by Leigh Taylor-Young.
The Light that Dr Lesh talked about in Poltergeist (1982) that appeared at the climax of Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Tangina mentions at the end of this film may derive from war stories that pilots claim to have seen in combat.
The producers were granted permission to use the John Hancock Tower in
Chicago for shooting providing that none of the building's residents
would be disturbed. The sixty person crew took four weeks just o figure
out the logistics, and ultimately the tenants even noticed that the film
was hooting there.
In the original ending that was scraped after Heather O'Rourke's tragic
death, when Patricia jumps through the glass pane into the apartment,
she finds Carol Anne, Donna, Scott, Bruce and Tangina frozen and dying.
She then also becomes imprisoned in ice and gets attacked by Kane and
her evil mirror reflection who want the necklace. Patricia tries to
repel them and declares unconditional love for her family, but trips
over frozen Tangina and falls to the floor. Suddenly, Tangina frees her
arm from the ice and grabs the necklace. She convinces Kane that she is
the one who can take him to the other side, not Carol Anne. Kane puts
his hand on the necklace, but instead of ascending, his face cracks and
he explodes. The blast frees everyone, but annihilates Tangina and
causes a violent thunderstorm. Patricia, Carol Anne, Donna, Scott and
Bruce finally leave the mirror dimension. Carol Anne sees a reflection
of smiling Tangina in the mirror who waves at them and sheds a tear.
With the shot of a rising morning sun, the movie ends.
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| The cast and crew we can blame for making this movie. |
