Opening Chill: The Sequel Nobody Ordered
By 1998, Stephen King’s brand had already been chewed on, spit out, and microwaved for TV a dozen times. Sometimes They Come Back (1991) was a passable small-screen creep-out. Sometimes They Come Back… Again (1996) was a shameless rehash with worse haircuts. But Sometimes They Come Back… for More? This straight-to-video sequel proves the law of diminishing returns applies not just to economics, but to resurrecting undead bullies in increasingly absurd locations.
This time, the devil and his goons aren’t haunting small-town teachers. No, now they’re in Antarctica—because nothing says horror like frigid snow and budget cosplay of The Thing.
The Setting: Antarctica on a Shoestring
The movie opens on a “secret military mining operation” in Antarctica. Translation: a couple of sets decorated with fake snow, fog machines on overdrive, and maybe a matte painting if you squint hard enough. The choice of location is clearly designed to evoke The Thing’s icy paranoia. Instead, it evokes a bad episode of Stargate SG-1 filmed in an abandoned meat locker.
The tension of isolation in the frozen wilderness is squandered by clumsy dialogue and characters who seem less concerned about hellspawn than about running out of hot cocoa.
Cast of Frozen Misfits
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Clayton Rohner as Captain Sam Cage: A square-jawed military man who delivers lines like he’s auditioning for a toothpaste commercial. Cage is supposed to be the rugged hero, but he mostly stumbles through corridors looking confused by the script.
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Chase Masterson as Major Callie O’Grady: Best known for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, here she spends most of her screen time coughing, collapsing, or glaring at Rohner. She deserves hazard pay—not for fighting demons, but for surviving this production.
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Faith Ford as Dr. Jennifer Wells: Yes, the mom from Murphy Brown. Imagine her going from sitcom banter to fighting Satan in Antarctica. She looks like she’s wondering if she left the oven on back in Los Angeles.
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Max Perlich as Lieutenant Brian Shebanski: A jittery tech officer who seems perpetually stoned, possibly because it was the only way to get through the script.
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Damian Chapa as Dr. Karl Schilling: A mad scientist archetype who exists solely to wave around a book about conjuring the Devil. He looks less like an expert in black magic and more like a guy who lost his library card.
When your cast list reads like a “Where Are They Now?” article from TV Guide, you know you’re in trouble.
Plot: The Thing Meets Scooby-Doo Meets “Why Bother?”
The story lurches forward like one of its reanimated corpses:
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A base worker goes berserk, which is how you know something “evil” is afoot.
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Cage and O’Grady rappel in by helicopter, because the movie needed one cool stunt before the budget ran out.
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Survivors are discovered, including Faith Ford as a medical officer who looks like she wandered in from a sitcom set.
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The radio is smashed. The bodies keep disappearing and reappearing. A satanic book is found because of course there’s always a satanic book.
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Eventually, the dead rise, led by a “diabolical master” who’s supposed to be terrifying but comes off like a roadie who got lost on his way to an Alice Cooper concert.
It’s like the scriptwriters tossed The Thing, Aliens, and a Chick tract about hell into a blender and then forgot to hit “puree.”
The Undead: March of the Bland
The monsters here aren’t frightening—they’re extras in shabby makeup stumbling down hallways. Sometimes they vanish, sometimes they reappear, sometimes they lurch menacingly before tripping over their own boots. They’re not so much demons as disgruntled mall security guards who wandered onto the wrong set.
The “master” demon is worse: underlit, overacted, and about as intimidating as a mall Santa with food poisoning.
Production Values: Arctic in All the Wrong Ways
The movie’s biggest special effect is fake snow, which it deploys liberally to convince us we’re in Antarctica. Spoiler: we’re not. The interiors look like boiler rooms repurposed from other productions, with “mining equipment” that appears to be spray-painted lawn furniture.
The camera work is murky, the editing clumsy, and the pacing glacial. Even the satanic book looks like it was bought from the clearance rack at Spencer’s Gifts.
Attempts at Suspense: Dead on Arrival
Suspense relies on characters you care about and stakes that matter. Sometimes They Come Back… for More offers neither. The military personnel are cardboard cutouts with ranks attached. The “secret operation” is never explained beyond “evil mining,” which sounds like a rejected Scooby-Doo plot.
Scenes that should be tense—like discovering corpses missing, or being stalked by the undead—are shot with all the urgency of a corporate training video. You don’t feel dread; you feel mild impatience, like waiting for your dial-up modem to connect.
The Legacy of King (Sort Of)
The first Sometimes They Come Back was loosely based on a Stephen King short story. By the third film, all connection to King has evaporated. His name is nowhere near the credits, probably because he was too busy cashing checks from better (or at least bigger-budget) adaptations. This film bears the title Sometimes They Come Back, but narratively it has as much to do with King as Free Willy 3 does with Moby-Dick.
Reception: Straight to Video, Straight to Obscurity
The film was released straight to video, where it immediately began haunting Blockbuster clearance bins. Critics ignored it. Fans of the original film ignored it. Even the undead ignored it. It exists now mostly as a footnote, the kind of movie horror nerds bring up in conversations that begin, “Hey, remember that really bad sequel nobody watched?”
If Sometimes They Come Back was a middling TV movie, and Sometimes They Come Back… Again was déjà vu with worse acting, Sometimes They Come Back… for More is cinematic frostbite: painful, ugly, and best avoided.
Final Verdict: Stay Home, Stay Warm
There’s a reason nobody talks about this film. It’s not fun-bad, not campy, not even memorably awful. It’s just dull. Horror set in Antarctica should feel oppressive, alien, terrifying. Instead, this film feels like being snowed in with coworkers you don’t like while someone reads you bad fanfiction about the Devil.
Verdict: If you see this VHS in the wild, bury it deep in the snow and hope it never resurfaces. Because sometimes they come back—but hopefully not this one.
