The Exorcist is frightening on its own. The original version of The Vanishing is so unnerving that one doesn't need to do anything to boost its creepy power.

But other would-be horror movies fall a little short of the mark and need your help to make them effective. It's best if you watch movies like these alone. At night. In a house that creaks. During a storm that makes the house creak.

Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again (1996) is so dull that you could do all of that and it still wouldn't be enough. You'd also have to make sure that the creaky house in which you watch it is in the middle of a graveyard that's possessed by strong evil spirits that you know don't like you. And even then you wouldn't be scared.

The ineptness of writer/director Adam Grossman and everyone else connected with Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again is made clear from the very start. An elderly woman cuts her finger with a kitchen knife in an ostensible accident that is staged so clumsily it looks more like an especially half-hearted suicide attempt. This deep wound bleeds just long enough for some blood to wash down the sink but not long enough that she needs a bandage. Which is a shame, because if she went to tend to her cut she wouldn't climb up on the world's most unstable stool to reach for something on the top shelf.

She falls, hits her head and dies. The cut and the fall happen in about a minute so it is obvious that the woman was not meant to be a character but a plot catalyst. Unfortunately, that's true also of everyone else who comes along during the next interminable hour and a half.

Our central characters are the dead woman's son and his daughter. They come to attend her funeral, pack up her possessions and sell her house. This takes what seems weeks because the father and daughter never actually wrap anything in newspaper or put anything in a box. Instead, the father watches as his daughter begins spending time with a tough kid in a black leather jacket that looks like it's left over from a Rebel Without a Cause knockoff. The father tries to look concerned.

As well he might. The biker guy is the spitting image of a biker guy who killed his sister about thirty years earlier. In his only flash of intelligence in the entire movie, the father quickly realizes that not only does the young man look like that killer from long ago, he is that killer from long ago. The father saw the killer and his accomplices kill his sister and then saw the bad guys get electrocuted in a puddle in the mine in which they killed her. But still he lets his daughter hang around the guy, even as a helpful priest clues him in to the fact that the killer is a demon who has resurrected himself through the force of his malevolent will and is killing people so their blood can bring back his comrades in harm.

Even when the priest repeatedly warns the father that the demon's plan is to kill the daughter the same way he did the sister three decades ago, the father sticks around. This isn't like Vera Miles going into the house on the hill in Psycho to save her sister (Janet Leigh). There is no reason for the father to stay in the town where his sister was killed and his daughter will be, except that the screenplay demands it. It would be easy to root for the demons to spoil the happy ending that these kinds of movies guarantee because at least the people being killed aren't even close to being humanity's best and brightest.

But the demonic herd needs some thinning too. Our would-be bad guys are so stupid that they step in the same puddle that they stepped in thirty years ago, only this time they do so before they kill the girl. The demons seem surprised when they are electrocuted again, but no one in the audience could be.

The makers of this movie have learned too little from powerfully scary movies. American in Werewolf in London taught them that humor can make horror more affecting, but they didn't learn that this only works if it's funny. The line that could be charitably described as the best in Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again comes after the head demon has run over someone's head with a lawnmower. He pauses to signal that he's going to deliver a line that cracks him up and then he says, "Looks to me like a bad hair day."

And writer/director Grossman and his crew have learned that movies with some fake bloodshed and other gruesome effects can succeed. But they haven't learned how to do that well. There is some minor gore in Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again, but it's not enough to satisfy lovers of blood and guts movies. And for squeamish viewers it is, pardon the expression, overkill.

What the movie's makers should have learned is that the scariest things are usually the ones we don't see. The power of imagination is stronger than the power of cinema, and the movies that scare us are the ones that engage our ability to conjure our own frightening images. In Jaws, the most powerful moments are like those at the very beginning when the woman is swimming alone at night and the menacing music starts playing while something grabs her from below. Not seeing the shark is scarier than seeing something and thinking, "Oh, that's not so bad."

There's been nothing in this review about the acting. That's because there isn't any. Michael Gross, who played the father on television's Family Ties, is apparently so accustomed to being the second-banana that he does nothing more than stand around as if he's waiting for Michael J. Fox to come along and give him something to react to. Jennifer Elise Cox plays one of the daughter's friends, a character clearly intended to be nothing more than the subject in a demonic sacrifice. Sure enough, the demons kill her while Cox tries valiantly to look terrified as they pelt her with evil playing cards. But the method of murdering is so goofy that Cox' greatest triumph is not moaning "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" to remind us that she was entertaining as Cindy Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie.

Alexis Arquette's portrayal of the demon makes Casper the Friendly Ghost look comparatively horrifying. And Hillary Swank is so muted as the daughter that it's hard to believe she's the same person who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her riveting performance in Boys Don't Cry. Clips from Swank's alleged acting in Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again will never be shown in an Oscar retrospective, unless the Academy is taken over by demons.

Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again is pointless. Mind-numbing. Tedious. Egregiously wasteful. The scariest thing about the movie is that one could exhaust a thesaurus and still not make the point strongly enough.



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This is an entry in WretchedPyro's homage to awfulness, "The Sequel Sucked Write-Off." Other writers taking on sub-standard follow-ups are:

alex_isit
bluehawq
bmcnichol
Cartman_2k
David.C
DavidK93
fez_monkey
gasjocket214
gigi1221
gorocco
kenshin-guy
korova
LEDOMAINE
lorendiac
matt_harney
monsfisch
mtbat
officer
Orestes84
patach
rader6795
redmaple
Sephiroth2000
Solid_Snake
SParkfan77
WretchedPyro
and Xeno3998

Read their entries and you could encourage a . . . sequel.






Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age