Wait, they're remaking Poltergeist?!

Weird, the image is flipped on the scene where the girl is drawn up the staircase. On trailer 1 the staircase ascends to the left (2:23), on trailer 2, to the right.

Yikes, some of that acting looks pretty wooden, particularly Sam Rockwell as the father.

 

http://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3...to-a-pool-with-real-skeletons-in-poltergeist/

https://puppatoons.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/creepy-stuff-real-skeletons-in-the-movie-poltergeist/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084516/trivia

 

That's a surprise. I always thought they looked fake.

 

Truth is stranger than fiction!

 

It's never a good sign when there are three people in the theater, including myself.

My review:

Haaaaaaaarible!

I liked absolutely nothing about this film.

 

I wonder if this movie will make us question our use of smart phones like Jaws made us afraid to go in the water?

 

No. The scariest thing in the movie is a squirrel.

 

Love Sam Rockwell, like Sam Raimi, love Poltergeist the original. This looks, and apparently is, terrible.

 

I'm also a fan of Rosemarie DeWitt. Sad that good actors were wasted in this pointless remake.

 

I did enjoy some of the actors. Sam Rockwell stands out, but is absolutely wasted. I assume that he's supposed to be an alcoholic, because his character is shown pouring what I'd call triple-shots and drinking them straight-up several times. Then it's totally waved away in a pointless reimagining of a key scene in the original. He's also supposed to be recently laid off, so I'm not sure what he's doing buying two houses during the movie.

We never really get a chance to connect with the family - they move into the house and bad things happen almost immediately. In the original, they actually seemed to enjoy what was happening and it was only when Carol Ann was snatched that things went south. It doesn't help any that the house is run down and creepy from the start, and you know that the box of clown dolls in the attic is going to be bad news. I'm still not sure how they jumped from "Carole Ann (she has a different name in this film) is in the TV" to getting the paranormal group from the college so quickly. You'd think that a parent would look for a rational explanation before immediately jumping to the irrational.

The key scenes are there; "they're here", the static on the TV, the clown, the tree, the swimming pool (sort of), and the "face" scene, things jumping out of the closet and making them drop the rope, but they've been neutered of everything that made them iconic in the original film.

Awful, just awful. I'd rather watch Poltergeist 3 again.

 

Quite a bit of the publicity of the film is because it was set in a suburb like the original, but it is in decline. Supposedly to reflect the move back to the cities. The house in this film is run-down and unattractive, and is a huge change from the brand new house of the original film. They spend a lot of time on the array of power lines that run behind the house, but this never pays off. There is also a comment about the vacant lot next door that is "owned by the city" but that never pays off either. Is this where the graves are? Was there once another house here? I have no idea.

The iconic line "you moved the headstones but didn't move the bodies!" is still in the film, but it's moved up to way earlier and removes any impact it might have had. I'm also unsure of how there could have been a subdivision there for decades, presumably with small children, but the ghosts never bothered anybody before? The only time we see other people in the neighborhood is the scene where the family is driving away, so maybe they don't have any neighbors? The final scene of the original film, where they shove the TV out of the hotel they are staying in is also ruined, when it is swapped for a scene where the family is apparently buying another house (how did they explain the last one?!?), and leave because it has a huge old tree in the yard.

Absolutely stupid. I was surprised to see only one screenwriter credited. I could have written a better film.

There is a post-credit scene involving the ghost hunter, who was apparently forgotten about by the rest of the cast. I didn't stick around to watch it.

* out of *****

 

Reposting this from the "Last Movie You Watched" thread:

POLTERGEIST (remake) - Saw it today and thought it was weak. Jump scares and CGI aren't scary to me. Knowing the original (though I've never been a major fan of it) took all the suspense out of the
endeavor, and echoing of iconic lines from the original just made me think about that film. Overall I kept thinking that the main reason this got remade was due to the success of recent paranormal films
like the CONJURING, INSIDIOUS, and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY series, all of which owe more than a small debt to POLTERGEIST. Seeing a remake of a film that has spawned so many
kissin' cousins at this point just feels like it's imitating the imitators.

 

Yeah, the head stones line is delivered and thrown away in such an off-the-cuff, flippant manner it seemed silly to me here.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/movies/original-poltergeist-scariest-scenes-119604151242.html

 

Remember the part where they were smoking a joint in bed? I was shocked by that when I was little.

 

They replaced it with a scene of them passing back and forth a fifth of whiskey.

Seriously.

 

I would imagine that would change the character of the ghosts that they see just a bit.

 

Really? The joint was scariest part of the original Poltergeist. All that "Just Say No." stuff in the 80's. I never did listen.

 

My slogan was "Just pass that over here...".

 

Amen!

 

The continuing sanitization of film and society.

 

and the original film was "PG", not "PG-13". Remember when PG movies had nudity? Now most R rated films don't even have nudity. We seem to be devolving as a culture, getting more prudish and backward as the years go by.

 

Tengo miedo!

 

In films and on television, yes. It's ironic that attitudes towards these issues in the real world are going in the opposite direction with marijuana being legalized or decriminalized in multiple states in the U.S. You would think films and television would reflect that change.

 

Marijuana in movies is reserved almost exclusively for comedic effect these days. Even in the original "Poltergeist," that was one of the more light-hearted scenes in the movie (especially when they're caught by the kids). That's actually what made the original so wonderful - and what apparently the new version is lacking (from what I've read and heard from others; I haven't seen it myself) - i.e., a sense of humor and playfulness along with the scares.