Poltergeist III

Carol Anne's got a problem. A poltergeist named Kane has been dogging her footsteps for three films now, and he wants her to lead him and his people "into the light" (restful death, apparently). Kane and his people had their slumber disturbed, if you recall, in Poltergeist, when real estate developers tore up the cemetery, and put in a housing development. Flash forward: a couple of years have passed, and Carol Anne is living with her Aunt Pat (Nancy Allen) and Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerrit) in a humongous apartment skyscraper. She's also seeing a psychiatrist, who insists, even when he witnesses direct evidence to the contrary, that Carol Anne has extremely suggestive hypnotic powers (like, she can dupe a roomful of strangers into believing some "thing" hurled a coffee cup through a two-way glass mirror--no problemo.) The first three-quarters of an hour is routinely spent on vapid dialogue which establishes the main characters (and a whole chunk of time is spent on Allen/Skerrit's daughter, who is basically a good girl, but feels compelled nonetheless to go along with her friends' desire to drink beer and skinny-dip in the building's pool--mostly because the studio wants to pitch the film to a teen audience.) And then we get down to it --i.e., Carol Anne is kidnapped by Kane (surprise!), and Zelda Rubenstein (Tangina, the dwarf psychic) returns to espouse some more mumbo-jumbo about the "light", and other tidbits of psychic trivia--while battling Kane and the forces of evil. If you toss logic out the window (which is usually a prerequisite for this kind of film anyway), Poltergeist III has its share of jumper scenes, and does keep the action moving at a fairly fast clip up until the predictably happy ending. In other words, it's a decent horror flick. It should be noted that this film received a lot of publicity when Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne) died during the latter stages of filming. Recommended for large fiction collections. (Available from most distributors.)