As crazy as it may seem, sometimes you just run out of Stephen King books to film – or at least books that you can afford to film; and when that happens, the inevitable occurs. That’s right, after the mad Stephen King gold rush that lasted all of the eighties and most of the nineties, affordable properties bearing the man’s name were starting to get a little thin on the ground so Hollywood does what it always does in situations like this – sequelize.
Of course, not a lot of King’s tales are custom built to shoot follow ups from, to while obvious titles such as The Shining and Misery were left alone, before you knew it, cheap-ass Children Of The Corn sequels were shooting up like the titular vegetable everywhere. However, that wasn’t even being close to ending things as producers desperate to squeeze every penny out of any property they could started making throwing out some of the most unnecessary franchise the horror genre had to offer. Yep, sometimes worthless horror properties come back… again.
After his elderly mother dies after an “accidental” fall, psychiatrist Jon Porter returns to his home town with his teenage daughter, Michelle, to settle her affairs, close up her house and, of course, attend her funeral. However, coming back to Glenrock us something of an uncomfortable endeavour for Jon as, when he was a child, he witnessed three greasers stab is older sister to death while performing a satanic ritual and ultimately killed the trio by electrocuting them with an exposed wire. Of course, what with this being a pale imitation of a classic King story, the foreshadowing hits like a truck immediately. A crazed preacher comes to him with claims that his mother’s death wasn’t as innocent as it appears and offers up supernatural warnings, Jon experiences harrowing nightmares of his daughter in danger and most disturbing of all, Michelle is being wooed by a boy who looks worryingly like Tony Reno, the leader of the greasers who died over thirty years ago.
Of course this is no mere form of paranoia as we know that this is the very same Tony Reno who did the high voltage two-step three decades earlier, but has managed to escape Hell with some funky, demonic powers after using the death of Jon’s mother to rise from the grave. However, he’s not just going to stop there because if he wants to bust his buddies out of eternal damnation, he’ll have to take more lives in order to resurrect them. Once the gang is back together, they’re free to finally target Jon and his and reenact the satanic ritual they attempted years ago only with Michelle in the place of Jon’s sister.
Can this normally rational psychologist unlearn everything he knows to expect that the supernatural is real and can he make the necessary sacrifices required to send Tony and his satanic pals back to the hellish netherworlds where they blatently belong?
So, I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to discover that the only real link that this thoroughly needless sequel has to Stephen King is that is a shameless retread of the original TV movie – however, because the film in question is probably one of the least-know adaptations out there, you openly wonder why the hell anyone actually bothered. To give the first Sometimes They Come Back it’s props, it was a passable shot at a Stephen King story but nothing anywhere near as memorable or iconic as the likes of the Maine Man’s A-list. However, STCB…Again doesn’t even try to cover its derivative tracks, not only running through the exact same basic plot, but even gking so far to copy the memorable aspects of the story. Maybe the filmmakers could have gotten away with it if they didn’t also make their villains a gang of switchblade waving greasers whose blatent overacting seems more in keeping with the T-Birds from Grease than any of the pantheon of sadistic bullies that tend to populate King’s work. Even the finger chopping sacrifice is present and correct and if it wasn’t for a surprisingly distinctive cast, I actually can’t think of a single reason why anyone would watch the film with its painfully repetitive soundtrack and predictable outcome.
Topping the bill while taking time out from shooting Graboids and parenting Michael J. Fox, Michael Gross seems to be phoning it in to a professional standard as the beleaguered Jon, but even checked out as much as he may be, you have got to give him a tip of the hat as he is the consummate professional all throughout this pointless exercise.
Next up is future Oscar winner Hillary Swank who, after once being the Next Karate Kid, now finds that demon punks stand between her and being taken seriously as a young, up and coming actress but once again, like Gross, while she’s immensely forgettable as she goes through the horror heroine motions, she’s giving it the old college try – even when a dream sequence has her rutting on the misshapen form of a demonic Tony. However, when it comes to the late Alexis Arquette (who went on to star in Children Of The Corn V only two years later – yeesh, tough break), I find myself with something of a conundrum. The actor attacks the villain role with such a blatent disregard of anything even remotely approaching subtlety that I genuinely can’t decide if it’s the worst or best thing about the movie by far. As Arquette zips about the place, spitting out sub-par Freddy Krueger puns and gurning at everyone with demonic contact lens, you can’t exactly claim that it’s dull. Yes, amassing a body count that includes conjuring vines to pull someone into the earth so a lawnmower can run over their head and throwing tarot cards into someone like ninja stars may not be the most dignified ways of killing people, but it’s certainly more fun than anything anyone else is doing. Also, I feel that I have to bring up that the demon makeups for Tony and his two goons are actually pretty damn good, especially the moment where one emerges from a hellpit in order to give the cameraman a big old eyefull of his gnarled body and its a shame that they weren’t featured more.
While arguably not as egregious a franchise attempt as the Mangler sequels, or as rampantly out of control as the endless Children Of The Corn entries King completists were forced to endure, Sometimes They Come Back… Again still is pretty bottom drawer sort of stuff. Even the attempts to match the author’s trademark detail seems to go strangely awry such as the random friend who is psychic or the mentally challenged gardener who has Speed Racer decorations all over his lawnmower. And yet, somehow the franchise came back… again, with a third entry that even has less to do with the original story. Never mind demon hooligans in leather jackets, sometimes shitty sequels come back and the bastards won’t leave no matter how many hints you try and drop.
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