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Nov. 2, 2021 - QAA
17:53
Premium Episode 146: Poltergeist II feat Bakoon (Movie Night) Sample

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Time Text
What's up, QAA listeners?
The fun games have begun.
I found a way to connect to the internet.
I'm sorry, boy.
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 146 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the QAA Movie Night Poltergeist II episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field.
Oh, I'm Oliver.
He's Bakun on Twitter.
That's correct.
Gotta be patient.
He's, he's shy.
I'm sorry, boys.
I like, I forgot we were recording a thing for a moment.
This is exactly what happened on our last episode because we did our, the last one we did with you, it was 420 and we were all absolutely, I had to edit out so much silence from that episode.
Oh yeah, we were all very, yeah.
And this is going to be kind of similar.
Yeah.
There can't be any silence because we're going to be talking about, you know, Academy Award winning film, Poltergeist II, The Other Side.
That is true.
That's right.
We're going to be talking about that movie, which Jake chose and, you know, bless him for choosing a sequel to a movie that we've never watched in the movie night.
So that's already a win.
Plus, if you watch it without any knowledge of the first, you have no fucking idea what the hell is going on.
If you're born within the year 1989 to, I would say 1997, Yeah.
You have, like, an innate internal knowledge of the first Poltergeist film.
Right.
That's true.
And you're also primed to be terrified of braces, that they might attack you from your mouth.
God, absolutely.
Yes.
And I also, I mean, the movie, we'll get into it, obviously.
Jake has a bunch of information about it.
We have our guest, Oliver Leitch, aka Bakun, who is, you know, known for liking every horror film, despite some of them being very bad.
There's some I don't like.
Well, you recommended Battle Angel Alita to me, and that was one of the most painful watching experiences I've ever had in my life.
I kind of liked it.
God damn it, man.
But you know what?
I also liked Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, which I saw in the theaters, which was the first all CGI movie.
You know what?
I'm going to watch that again, actually.
That movie's terrible.
That was not a good time.
There we go.
So yeah, we're very happy to have you on for this.
I think it's perfect, and Poltergeist 2 is a beautiful mess.
It's like a Lazy Susan of different types of horror genres, and it often transitions from scene to scene in, like, the least seamless way possible.
Just completely, shockingly different phases to the film.
Like, the Spielbergian schmaltz from the first one has been left out on the counter for a couple nights.
It's gotten kind of There's kind of a hard shell around it.
It's gotten kind of a funk to it.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's trippy.
It's like kind of bright.
Yes.
Like a lot of the horror happens like under bright lights.
There's not too much, like there's not a lot of, you know, looking through dark rooms and waiting for something to jump out at you.
It's not, it's not that kind of horror, which is, I think one of my favorite things about the Poltergeist series at large is that the way they do their spirits is kind of in the vein of like Ghostbusters where they, it's a lot of like animation.
Yes.
Like hand-drawn animation to how they do the spirits.
I love that.
When you talk about quote-unquote daytime horror, or sun-drenched horror they call it, you talk about this Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the scene in Poltergeist 2 where the old preacher, you know, reveals for the first time when he walks up the house.
I love too like if they made this movie nowadays that the preacher you wouldn't know if he's a ghost like for the first act or or not but like in this movie like right away you see him like walking through people at the mall it's like no this is a ghost it's chasing after the little girl we're in the first like 15 minutes of the movie like no this is the bad guy like at the strip mall right yeah yeah it's at the mall again yeah very sun-drenched like all In fact, it never really builds up much suspense.
This is maybe one of the least suspenseful horror movies I've ever seen.
It's just like, either it's action or it's basically like, I don't know, like a family soap opera.
Yeah.
Very fun.
Yeah.
Let's jump right into it, Jake.
Yeah, sure.
Okay, so a little background on the movie.
So, Poltergeist II, The Other Side, it was released in 1986, shortly after my birth.
It was written by Michael Grace and Mark Victor, who also wrote Cool World, which is a movie that I love.
With Gabriel Byrne and Brad Pitt before he had plastic surgery on his ears.
It was directed by Brian Gibson, who went on to direct What's Love Got to Do With It.
I don't know, I have not seen that film.
He also directed The Juror with Richard Gere, which was kind of like a decent 90s sort of like legal thriller.
And the film was produced by MGM Studios.
It cost $19 million to make this movie, and it sold about $41 million in ticket sales at the box office.
So, not too bad, but probably not what they were hoping for.
I think it came out to kind of middling reviews.
One thing that I found interesting is that the movie was shot entirely in Los Angeles.
The main location of the house was in Altadena.
Uh, which is just up near Pasadena in LA, and there was a secondary location in Encino, which is up in the valley.
The replicas for the indoor scenes were shot at MGM Studios in Culver City, Los Angeles.
And one thing that I found interesting is that the soundtrack was composed by Academy Award winner Jerry Goldsmith, who did fucking Chinatown, Logan's Run, The Original Alien, The First Star Trek, Gremlins, Secret of NIMH, a secret banger, uh, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Rudy, just to name a couple.
Yeah.
But the sound work in that movie is awful.
I know because I had to work with clips of it for our episode.
famous QAnon movie starring Ben Affleck. But the sound work in that movie is
awful. I know because I had to work with clips of it for our episode. Damn. I mean,
gremlins...
Gremlins, hell of a soundtrack.
Total Recall, hell of a soundtrack.
Oh yeah.
Poltergeist 2?
Yeah, sure.
You know what?
Yeah, it was okay.
It was okay.
It was okay.
It wasn't memorable.
No.
It wasn't something that I walked away from being like, oh, the soundtrack in that was actually really good.
No.
But mostly because if someone showed you these images with no music, like, what the fuck are you going to come up with to balance out all these scenes that are shifting tone so dramatically, so quickly?
Poltergeist 1 is so good that this movie can do a lot of bullshit while still holding itself together on the strength of that first one.
And it does a lot of goofy bullshit.
And it really does depend.
It's one of those sequels that you don't really see anymore that is so dependent on seeing the first movie.
Well, I mean, the recent Halloween kills, that just picks up directly.
That's true.
Like middle of the line, almost, for one dork.
It's like finding a corpse.
You get it a bit, but it is a rarity.
You get it more in the horror genre, I would say.
It does feel a bit like they took the fun and games phase of like a normal movie and just stretched it over the whole movie a bit, like Gremlins 2, where you're just fucking going from like sketch to sketch.
Yeah, it's just, uh, dad's invention, then another dad's invention, and then another dad's invention.
Uh, what if the movie was The Shining?
Yeah, okay, let's make the dad just drink for no reason right now, and um, and then he's gonna become, then he's gonna puke up an entire alien entity.
Like, just ideas like that.
Like, let's have the kid's braces attack him and become like a metal monster.
Like, yeah.
Coach, Coach does drink a bit.
He goes a bit aggro on this one.
He does, he does.
He swallows the damn worm, which we all know is demonic.
The H.R.
Giger worm, which I'm sure I wanna go into.
Yeah, I was so, I actually wrote that later on in the doc, is that like, I was very surprised to see that H.R.
Giger designed the creatures, but then when you look at the creature, you're like, oh, okay, that makes perfect sense.
It completely looks it, and like, his drawings for it are fucking terrifying.
But like the first Poltergeist, that was luxe.
That was big.
That was Spielberg.
That was, you know, prestige.
They could get geek.
You know, people are lining up for it.
Yeah.
And this movie is very, like, wacky.
Like, the dad is very wacky in it constantly.
Yes.
Which I liked, actually.
Like, he had a couple wacky scenes in the first one when he's tooting on that reefer.
That's true, that's true.
But the whole movie, the second one, he's kind of a cartoon of who he was in the first one, I bet.
They all are.
So the setup for this movie, the basic sort of premise of the film, is that the Freely family from the first movie is staying with Diane, who's played by Jo Beth Williams, at her mother's house after narrowly escaping the events of the first film.
Which I hope everyone who's listening watched, because it's great, but also very necessary to understand what's going on in this film.
It becomes clear early on that whatever evil they believed they had escaped from has followed them here, and continues to wreak havoc on the Freelies.
The film opens with a ceremony performed by Taylor, one of the film's main characters.
And potentially the ghost of a powerful shaman?
I mean, I didn't look too deeply into this, but there's a couple scenes where he kind of disappears and then reappears sort of magically, and I wonder if there's discussion online whether or not Taylor himself is some sort of spirit.
At that point, you're thinking more deeply into the film than anyone who wrote it, produced it, or directed it.
Definitely.
This is not like the hermetic Kubrickian, you know.
Yeah, no.
There's a line when Cain comes to the house, which we'll clip later, where Cain says, he's like, I believe there's an Indian staying here with you.
And he's like, yeah, Taylor, and he's like, huh, so that's what he calls himself now.
And I took that as a clue that this Taylor is is something great is something greater.
Well, I took it to mean he is trying to intimate to this Caucasian homeowner that.
This man in this house is a villain.
He's a roustabout.
He's going from state to state, changing his name, rifting off people.
That's what I think it is.
That could be it as well, yeah.
Like he comes up to the door like an old cracker, you know, saying like, you know... Yeah, I mean, you could read it as this is an ancient encounter between ghosts, or you could read it as he's playing on...
Yeah.
Well, what a fucking white settler from, what, the 1800s would play on, which is just pure racism.
Absolutely.
So it opens on Taylor, who's performing this ceremony on what looks like one of the mesas in Sedona, where Travis and I went for the Q-Pilled Alien conference.
During the ceremony, the fire turns blue.
And 80s style animated spirits are released from the flames and inhaled directly into Taylor's nostrils like some sort of paranormal cocaine.
We see Taylor driving his old pickup truck to the site where the first movie takes place.
Where the house from that film used to be standing, there's now a giant crater.
If you guys remember, the first movie ends with the house sort of devouring itself.
Once he's there, Taylor meets up with Zelda Rubinstein's character, Tangina, and she informs him that they believe they've found the source of the haunting.
After digging into the rock beneath what used to be the swimming pool, Taylor descends into darkness and finds a cavern just packed with decaying bodies and skeletons.
Where's the family now?
He asks.
We cut to the Freely family, who's enjoying a picturesque outdoor lunch with their grandmother.
It's a stark contrast to where we left them in the first film.
It's bright, So in this, like, picnic advertisement scene, it's revealed that Carol Anne can sense colors with her mind.
When her grandmother asks for various swaths of yarn, Carol Anne reaches into the basket and retrieves them without even looking.
and getting home from work.
So in this picnic advertisement scene, it's revealed that Carol-Anne
can sense colors with her mind.
When her grandmother asks for various swaths of yarn, Carol-Anne reaches into the basket
and retrieves them without even looking.
So our first clue from the writer that Carol-Anne possesses certain gifts
and that the grandmother can sense them.
That's a very special gift that you and I have.
[Music]
It's nothing to be scared of.
Will it help me be a ballerina?
Yes, sure it will.
Whatever you dream, you can be.
This is your classic scene of, you know, revealing that the gift has, like, skipped a generation, right?
That the grandmother can sense things, the daughter can sense things.
The mom can a bit.
A bit.
And right after this, she and the grandmother actually have this argument about You know, her wanting Carol Ann to just be normal and to have a normal existence as a kid and the grandma saying, but you can't ignore these gifts.
And what's so funny is that like, so, so you're, you know, what you're mentioning sets up this kind of idea of like, yeah, matrilineal, you know, people who can sense things in other worlds and maybe the future and maybe the position of objects or colors with their hands and all that stuff.
And then they're like, okay.
And now for the next hour, we're going to watch like the dad who's not at all clairvoyant.
He's just going to go to man camp with some completely random guy.
And he keeps telling him, hey, you're a warrior now.
You're in a fight.
But neither of those plot lines really ever evolve into anything.
I mean, the closest conclusion you get is, yeah, the mom at the end being like, ah, yeah, I'm also in touch with this stuff.
And I guess that kind of helps them defeat the demon, like, in some way.
But it's all over the place.
It really just serves as expository.
The mom discovering her gift really only serves the story in the way that you get the final piece of lore of who Cain really is.
But the dad, when the preacher comes to the door, he plays immediately on the dad, like, you can't take care of your family, you're scared, you're not a real man.
Right.
And then immediately when Taylor shows up, he tells him the same thing, like, you gotta be a man, you're gonna be a warrior, all this stuff.
So it's kind of about a man doing like, yeah, you know.
semen retention and becoming more powerful. But then yeah, it ties in like
zero-- that side of things does not tie in in any way to that the whole crux of
this which is yeah these this matrilineal clairvoyant line in the
family. --Well if it was just the ladies learning their powers like the dudes and
the dads watching it, they would feel kind of emasculated and left out. --Maybe they would
start drinking and become violent. --Once the-- so once the kids are in bed,
Stephen, played by Craig T. Nelson, and Diane Jo Beth Williams discuss what
they're going to do about the insurance from the last house.
And one thing I actually really like about these movies is I feel like, in some ways, the family reacts as real people would.
Like, when shit starts hitting the fan, they don't stay in the house.
They, like, move, you know?
They move right away.
They're like, no, we're getting in the car.
We're getting out of here.
Um, which is kind of atypical for, like, haunting movies.
Usually there's a reason that they have to stay in the house.
Yeah.
They go to the motel and they roll the TV out into the hallway.
They say that if the house disappeared, then technically it's only missing.
Missing?
What do they think, this house is gonna return or something?
Now it's been a full year, the house is not coming back!
I got a gut feeling, Diane, I'm positive about that!
I know that, Steven!
You tell him that...
No, no.
I'm gonna fill out the first claim.
Oh, great.
Well, what are we gonna claim this time?
Act of God?
House-napping?
Stephen.
We are almost broke.
Okay, we're broke, but we're not starving.
Okay, but I don't happen to like having to live off my mother, and I think that we deserve a house of our own again someday.
Oh, honey, gee, gosh.
See, that's the difference between you and me, Diane.
I am into downward mobility.
I'm not settled for it.
I'm into it.
I like getting out there in the streets and meeting those people.
I like selling vacuums.
I like carrying the pipes and the apparatus and my little demo case.
Let's get the kids up and we'll...
We'll paint the car different colors, kind of day glow, like we used to do when we were kind of freaky.
You know, the freaky Freelings on the road again!
You know, the family whose house disappeared!
Watch them find it, Diane!
I'm not going to get upset about this, but I'll tell you something.
I'm writing them back, and when I sign that letter, I'm signing, Mr. President!
You know it's really funny, I was doing some research and the reason that Craig T. Nelson has the T in his name is because there was another actor registered to SAG with Craig Nelson, the actor Craig Richard Nelson.
Oh no.
And Poltergeist was Craig T. Nelson's first big thing, so he like had to distinguish himself, you know, he basically, he couldn't register his name with SAG because there was somebody else there.
And now the T is golden.
The T is his trademark.
He's also pretty red-pilled.
I found an interview.
I was going to play it, but I don't think it's worth it.
No, no, no.
Please play this Glenn Beck interview from 2009.
I want to see this.
You want to see it?
Okay.
Yes.
There are programs that they're asking me to fund that I refuse to fund.
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Thanks.
I love you.
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