Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kenedi Clements, Kyle Catlettt, Jane Adams and Jared Harris
Screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed Gil Kenan
Rated PG-13 (supposedly intense frightening images, suggestive material and a giggly little girl saying the word shit)
The 1982 classic Poltergeist is really the only horror film that I saw when I was a kid, and it's still not only my favorite, it's the only one that still scares me a bit. I am not a believer in ghosts and the supernatural at all in real life, but every time I hear Zelda Rubinstein utter the words "to her, he is just another child. To us, he is the beast" a cold chill goes through me.
This new version is arguably the first remake of a Steven Spielberg film (arguably because we will never really know who truly directed the original, the credited director, Tobe Hooper, or Spielberg himself, as some cast members have insisted.). That's a precedent that doesn't set well with me, but I nevertheless tried to enter the film with an open mind. Not very hard, mind you, but I did try.
Eric and Amy Bowen (Rockwell and DeWitt) are a young, stupid and self absorbed couple who are in a bit of a rut, between Eric getting laid off and Amy being awkwardly unattractive, especially when she is trying to be sexy in the obligatory underwear scene. The couple decides to move their three children into a house in the suburbs that none of them seem to like, agreeing that at least it's something else they can be angsty and bitch about and, whenever possible, take it out on the kids. ("We have too many children," says Eric, complaining about his troubled son as he pours himself a drink. "Here's to little jerks.")
The three junior Bowens, who were purchased directly from a stock Hollywood kid catalogue, are Kendra, a teenaged girl who (this is creative) really likes malls and phones; Griffin, an awkward, troubled 10 year old boy who might be suffering from agoraphobia and possibly even autism, or maybe just the fact that his parents are total asses to him all the time; and Maddie, a little girl who was scarred for life by being born two decades too late to star in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street, which has lead to her frequently talking to imaginary friends in an ever so cute and precocious kind of way that in no way forshadows anything.
Almost immediately, things start going wrong, starting with the box of creepy clown dolls that falls out of the attic, which the family wisely decides to keep in the bedroom of the little boy with an intense, crippling fear of everything, to Maddie making contact with with a presence inside the TV, which causes her to blow her big scene by saying "they're here" in a lifeless monotone. But when Eric and Amy go out to a dinner party and leave the oldest in charge, surprise surprise, that's when the Poltergeists come to terrorize the kids, reference iconic moments from the original and pull little Maddie into their realm inside the closet.
Eric is worried that if they go to the police about their daughter's dissappearance, they might get blamed. So they shrewdly determine that nothing can possibly go wrong with hiding the fact of their missing child from the authorites, and go to the paranormal science department of the local college, where they enlist the aid of Dr. Brooke Powell (played by Jane Adams, whom you may recognize as having played Alex Keaton's brief love interest Marti on the last season of Family Ties, especially if you are bored as I was at this point in the movie.). Dr. Powell comes to their aid with her tallest white student and her blackest female student in tow just to cover all of her bases.
But when even these three plucky and intrepid ghost hunters can't do anything to bring Maddie back, it's time to bring in the big guns, and Powell enlists the aid of Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris) a television celebrity from a show called "Haunted House Cleaners" (his catch phrase, "This house is clean" is yet another smirking wink at the original, referencing one of Rubinstein's iconic lines.). Kendra is of course totally thrilled at this, being a big fan of the show, and seems to completely forget that her baby sister is literally trapped in hell, because there's a minor celebrity in her house. How awesome is that!
On the whole, this is a very uneasy mix of hitting everything on the checklist that you absolutely have to have in order to convince fans that the filmmakers have at least seen the original, and being so painfully resigned to the fact that they can't illicit scares using the same techniques that we saw before, and that was a surprise over 30 years ago may be more than a little bit expected now, that there is no slow build whatsoever, and the creepy music starts long before anything remotely abnormal happens and never lets up. What's more, the original approach of getting the biggest scares out of what they don't show you is totally abandoned in favor of showing everything, even going so far as to have the team send a drone camera into the closet abyss, turning one of the most frightening locations ever left to your imagination into a weak replica of a Halloween spook alley (at any moment I expected to see a High School dropout with a dull chainsaw jump out.).
The movie has a few moments here and there that actually work, like a memorable sequence involving a powerdrill, but overall it's only real strength is the likability of young actor Kyle Catlett as Griffin, and the camp factor of Harris channeling his father at his absolute drunken, hammy best. This movie doesn't just pale by comparison to the real, classic Poltergeist, but to countless inferior ripoffs we've been subjected to over the past few decades.
If you want to be frightened, check out Reese Witherspoon's performance in Hot Pursuit. If you want to actually enjoy yourself at the movies, there are much better options out there than this tepid mess.
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