They’re here… again.
Directed by: Gil Kenan
Written by: David Linsay-Abaire
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jared Harris, Jane Adams, Kyle Catlett, Saxon Sharbino
The H-Bomb: After being laid off from his job, Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) moves his wife, Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt), and three children, Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), Griffin (Kyle Catlett), and Madison (Kennedi Clements), to a new home in a neighborhood that has seen many foreclosures as of late. It seems like a fairly nice home, but given the family’s reaction, it is most definitely a downgrade from where they were living. Still, Eric is determined to make the best of it, no matter how loud his kids might bitch.
However, as good-enough-for-now as the house seems to be, there is more to it than meets the eye. There are bones in the front yard, creepy clown dolls upstairs, a tree that bangs against the window… and something the real estate agent forgot to mention, the entire neighborhood was built on top of an old cemetery. If all that isn’t enough, the TV has been acting really funny. Of course, none of this is cause for alarm, that is, until the Bowen’s youngest child, little Madison, goes missing…
Horror movie remakes… sigh. I’m not predisposed to hate them all. There have been a few, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, and The Hills Have Eyes, that I thought were decent. Also, I have never been the biggest fan of the original Steven Spielberg/Tobe Hooper Poltergeist. I think it’s a perfectly all right film, but it was so effects heavy it was borderline cartoonish, and I just never found it particularly scary. When compared to the The Changeling (1980) or The Legend of Hell House, Poltergeist was downright weak. Hell, even Insidious, which is kind of an unofficial remake of Poltergeist, I think is far scarier.
So, having no real devotion to the original film, I’m able to sit down and watch the 2015 remake, from director Gil Kenan (Monster House) and producer Sam Raimi, with a feeling of complete neutrality, since no one is ruining my childhood, here. And, having seen it, I can say it’s better than The Gallows, or Ouija. That is the good news. The bad news is, that’s about the nicest thing I can say about this flat, plodding, and utterly pointless remake. I may not find the original Poltergeist all that scary, but next to this counterfeit, it is terrifying.
Was I ever scared at any point during this retread? Fuck no. Was I ever even creeped out by anything going on? Absolutely not. Not even remotely. On those grounds alone, Poltergeist 2015 fundamentally fails as a horror film. It is a distressingly monotonous experience, totally devoid of any tension, or suspense. Yeah, we get objects moving by themselves, and loud bangs, and bright lights… but no sense of eeriness, or fear. Even the recreation of the scene with the young girl in front of the TV is totally ineffectual, complete with a flat delivery of the iconic “They’re here.” It was as if the filmmakers were just going through a checklist of things from the original that must be included, just because. Poltergeist 2015 is very much a remake in the way Carrie was back in 2013… it’s a diluted facsimile, adding nothing new, and taking away quite a bit.
I felt no sense of danger for the Bowen family. Whereas with the family in 1982 movie, you could feel the fear and the desperation they were in. Here, no one seems particularly afraid or even all that concerned about all the weirdness going on, save for one scene of the mother and daughter crying over the lost little sister. The moment where the dad breaks down emotionally and begs a paranormal expert to help him find his daughter feels totally unearned, because it comes completely out of nowhere. We the audience are never made to connect with, or care about these people.
The big hook of the first Poltergeist, was that it was a haunted house movie made on a large budget, with what were, at the time, state of the art special effects. Well, we’ve gotten plenty of effects-saturated haunted house movies since then, so that is no longer a novelty of any kind. Poltergeist 2015 is just the latest ghost flick to feature an overabundance of CGI bullshit. And oh-my-aching-banana is the CGI goddamn embarrassing. When the black tar hand lashed out for someone’s ankle out of the black tar puddle on the floor, it was a pure Sy-Fy Channel moment. When the ghost realm is revealed towards the end, it conjured up memories of the first Silent Hill game from 1999.
If any of this sounds terrifying to you, then by all means, go out and buy the Blu-Ray. Give these fine folks the incentive to keep shoveling half-assed horror shit like this in our direction. The only sequence that even comes close to being effective is the one involving a power drill. It’s a substitute for the face peeling scene from the 1982 film, and it is somewhat well staged, although since it involves a character we barely even know, it’s still ultimately ineffectual, because we just don’t give a shit what happens to this person.
If there is one thing Poltergeist 2015 benefits from, it’s from having a much better cast than it deserves. Rockwell has a natural likability to him, that makes him quite the sympathetic patriarch, even when he’s doing absolutely bone-headed things like spending money he doesn’t have, or taunting the paranormal investigators who are there doing him a favor. He does have good chemistry with DeWitt, who has little to do, except look concerned. In the early parts of the film, they do interact like a real couple with kids, I’ll give them that much. The real standout, though, is Jared Harris as a medium with his own reality show. Battle scarred, slightly eccentric, and a bit sleazy, he won’t make us forget about Zelda Rubinstein, but he’s the only character written with any kind of color or personality, and he did manage to inject a little fun into the proceedings.
Sadly, more fun was needed to make this new Poltergeist worth a damn. It’s a movie that wanted to be a special effects spectacle on the one hand, and a straight-up supernatural thriller on the other. Trouble is, the effects look cheap and outdated, and the thrills are nonexistent. As a result, the film is a limp, 93 minute slog that feels about an hour longer than it actually is. If you are a fan of the original film, you would be very wise to pass this one by, as this is a dull, watered down carbon copy that has no rhyme or reason to exist.
