20th Century Fox
Eric and Amy Bowen (Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt) are moving their family after Eric lost his job, and they have finally found a house within their price range. Their oldest daughter, Kendra, isn’t too excited to live so far from her friends and so close to power lines. Their son, Griffin, isn’t too thrilled about his attic room with its skylight looking up to a creepy old tree. Their youngest daughter, Maddy, loves her new room, especially the closet doorknob that can make her hair stand on end when held.
The occasional odd occurrence happens, including little Maddy talking to the “Lost People” in the staticky TV. One night, Eric and Amy go out to a dinner with friends and Kendra has babysitting duties. Griffin ends up attacked by not only the weird collection of clowns he found in a crawlspace, but the creepy tree, as well. Kendra is almost swallowed by the basement floor. Maddy follows some pretty balls of light into her closet and is grabbed by entities within its darkness.
The family seeks help from a parapsychologist, Dr. Brooke Powell (Jane Adams), and two of her students. After only one night in the house, Dr. Powell realizes she needs more help and calls in Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), a ghost hunter with his own TV show who’s an actual psychic. Burke respects the family’s wishes and leaves the TV crew out of the proceedings. He helps them better understand what they’re dealing with as he tries to clean the house of its spirits.
I went back and watched the original classic a few days before seeing this remake. Director Gil Kenan (“Monster House,” “City of Embers”) does his best, here, but it’s not quite good enough. While he does conjure up some decent scares every once in a while, they tend to only be during the new fright material.
The rehashes of the classic scares fail to frighten nearly as well as they do in the original. The living tree was the only one that kind of impressed me, but only right as it grabs Griffin. All it ends up doing is swinging the boy around, which is far less frightening than a tree that tries to swallow someone.
There are some good things about the movie, namely the actors. Rockwell and DeWitt are decent substitutes for Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, both possessing the humor and caring of a loving pair of parents. They also found a really good little actress to play Maddy. As with Carol Anne in the original, much of the film’s impact hinges on this character’s innocence and cute factor. Maddy has this, especially with a line she says to a realtor, but there’s still something even more arresting about the innocence of Carol Anne, especially the way she delivers her signature line. It still gives me chills to this day.
One of the worst character makeovers is Jared Harris as Burke, the psychic. Zelda Rubenstein had a good career, but no matter what she did after she was always “The weird lady from ‘Poltergeist.’” She put a stamp on that role. You looked at her and believed she could commune with the spirit plane. Making Harris a TV ghost hunter undermines the fact that he actually can talk to spirits. They try hard to cement his validity through a scene discussing the scars on his body from angry ghosts, but we in the real world have an ingrained disbelief of TV ghost hunters that is hard to overcome.
What this remake is sorely missing, that the original had in spades, is heart and magic. The original takes its time to bring us to the worry point. It first pulls us into the average life of this loving family, showing us how they deal with mundane things like the death of a pet or having your remote on the same frequency as your neighbor. Heck, they show and interact with the neighbors, who are practically non-existent in the remake. There are only small hints here and there that something’s hinky, and they even embrace it for a little while, like letting Carol Anne get pulled across the kitchen floor. They’re happy people whose lives get turned upside down.
That’s one thing that hinders the remake: They don’t begin so happy. The movie starts with a cloud hanging over everything due to Eric’s unemployment. Sure, it’s a way to make it relevant to a wide section of the audience, but if you start in a semi-dark place, the darker places aren’t as scary.
Another thing that hurts the remake is showing too much. I had heard that Kenan was eager to go past the barrier and show us the other realm where Maddy gets trapped, and I admit it was one idea that intrigued me about this remake and made me more receptive to it. Unfortunately, it only serves to prove something I’ve said a few times about this CGI era: Just because you CAN do or show something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
After viewing this movie, it made me appreciate the original more because it let me use my imagination about what was in there, and that makes it much worse. All you really need is sweet, innocent Carol Anne’s scared little voice to inject terror into your bones about what she might be facing on the other side. Show me what Maddy’s going through and I’m kind of creeped out, but I’m nowhere near the shivering point. Same goes for hearing sounds and showing shadowy hands press up against the TV screen as Maddy talks to the “Lost People.” When a little girl talks to “nothing,” it’s way more freaky.
While some decent performances and a couple of creative new scares are contained within, this “Poltergeist” only proves that more is definitely less.
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