Modal Trigger
Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) and wife Amy (Rosemarie
DeWitt) desperately try to hold on to their youngest daughter, Madison
(Kennedi Clements), who’s been targeted by terrifying apparitions.
Photo: 2015 FOX/MGM
MOVIE REVIEW
Poltergeist
Hauntingly familiar
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, scary images, child peril)
“Poltergeist” is heaving with the scariest things you can
possibly imagine: The mad clown doll that comes alive. The undead
seeking revenge. The bitchy teen girl. You can sense why the ghouls
don’t kidnap the high schooler. Who would want to spend eternity
listening to her gripe about her broken smartphone?
Building on the sacred bones of 1982’s “Poltergeist,” this serviceable remake sticks fairly closely and smartly to the same plot, with the same scary objects and even the line, “They’re here.” A young couple (Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt) with a bratty teen girl (Saxon Sharbino), boy (Kyle Catlett) and adorable 6-year-old girl (Kennedi Clements) loses the latter when the TV swallows her. Getting her back means hooking a rope to the wall, stepping into Satan’s closet and trying to find the girl among the writhing dead whose spirits infest the house because it was built on a cemetery.
It all comes at a 21st-century clip: This is that rare movie that’s actually too short. You’re barely halfway through your box of Jujubes before there are grasping corpses burbling out of the muck, strangly clowns and a tree busting through the window.
The remake improves on the original in a couple of respects: The effects are much better, of course — there’s a fantastically creepy interval set among rows of restless corpses underground — and the script is lightly witty without resorting to cheap self-mockery of the “we know we’re just characters in a movie” variety that ruins so many horror movies.
Much of the wit, I suspect, is down to the incomparable Rockwell, who turns the usual false-alarm early scare into a laugh line: He hurls himself against the walls a few times, contorts his face in horror and announces, “We have a squirrel.” There’s also a fun idea in having the ghost hunter (Jared Harris) be the host of a cheesy reality show and the parapsychologist (Jane Adams) be his ex-wife. “I have special powers!” he boasts. “You’re not that special,” she replies.
The move hints that it’s going to broaden the original movie’s reach from satirizing TV addiction to terror of anything with an off switch: They’re everywhere! One thing that goes bump in the house is Mom’s shin, after she walks into a box because she’s looking at her iPad.
But the movie, directed by Gil Kenan (“Monster House”), feels like the studio cut it down to the bare minimum, figuring that the horror-movie audience has no time for the kind of niceties that would have rounded things out. So the subtext gets tossed, very little time is spent on establishing character bonds, and the back story about the house being built on a cemetery is reduced from whole scenes to a couple of lines of dialogue. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it’s hard to explain why the film didn’t reprise the thrilling moment when JoBeth Williams turned a rope into an artificial umbilical cord and went into the darkness to save her baby.
Still, there’s plenty to rattle your cage here, and just as the original was one of the scariest PG movies ever, the reboot has about as much gruesomeness as you can possibly stuff into a PG-13. You know you’ve done your work as a horror movie when a viewer cheerfully calls out (as did someone in the audience at a Thursday night screening), “That’s f—ed up!”
Building on the sacred bones of 1982’s “Poltergeist,” this serviceable remake sticks fairly closely and smartly to the same plot, with the same scary objects and even the line, “They’re here.” A young couple (Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt) with a bratty teen girl (Saxon Sharbino), boy (Kyle Catlett) and adorable 6-year-old girl (Kennedi Clements) loses the latter when the TV swallows her. Getting her back means hooking a rope to the wall, stepping into Satan’s closet and trying to find the girl among the writhing dead whose spirits infest the house because it was built on a cemetery.
It all comes at a 21st-century clip: This is that rare movie that’s actually too short. You’re barely halfway through your box of Jujubes before there are grasping corpses burbling out of the muck, strangly clowns and a tree busting through the window.
The remake improves on the original in a couple of respects: The effects are much better, of course — there’s a fantastically creepy interval set among rows of restless corpses underground — and the script is lightly witty without resorting to cheap self-mockery of the “we know we’re just characters in a movie” variety that ruins so many horror movies.
Much of the wit, I suspect, is down to the incomparable Rockwell, who turns the usual false-alarm early scare into a laugh line: He hurls himself against the walls a few times, contorts his face in horror and announces, “We have a squirrel.” There’s also a fun idea in having the ghost hunter (Jared Harris) be the host of a cheesy reality show and the parapsychologist (Jane Adams) be his ex-wife. “I have special powers!” he boasts. “You’re not that special,” she replies.
The move hints that it’s going to broaden the original movie’s reach from satirizing TV addiction to terror of anything with an off switch: They’re everywhere! One thing that goes bump in the house is Mom’s shin, after she walks into a box because she’s looking at her iPad.
But the movie, directed by Gil Kenan (“Monster House”), feels like the studio cut it down to the bare minimum, figuring that the horror-movie audience has no time for the kind of niceties that would have rounded things out. So the subtext gets tossed, very little time is spent on establishing character bonds, and the back story about the house being built on a cemetery is reduced from whole scenes to a couple of lines of dialogue. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it’s hard to explain why the film didn’t reprise the thrilling moment when JoBeth Williams turned a rope into an artificial umbilical cord and went into the darkness to save her baby.
Still, there’s plenty to rattle your cage here, and just as the original was one of the scariest PG movies ever, the reboot has about as much gruesomeness as you can possibly stuff into a PG-13. You know you’ve done your work as a horror movie when a viewer cheerfully calls out (as did someone in the audience at a Thursday night screening), “That’s f—ed up!”
No comments:
Post a Comment