Poltergeist remake...

[Octoberist]

I forgot that this movie existed.

 

[Sawyer]

Overall, this was like a really botched up parody of the original, not that i'm huge fan of the original either.

 

[Primal Slayer]

Saw it, liked it, didn't hate it. Wrapping up the Poltergeist was underwhelming but thats about all.

 

[The Shape]

6/10

 

[Farren]

Sam Rockwell: forever lesser known despite his talents and charisma.

Truth.

 

[Primal Slayer]

Rewatching the original and totally forgot how different it was from the remake, good for them for crafting their own story.

 

[Kane52630]

indeed. It's how they should do remakes, update the story but keep the same energy as the original.

 

[Jaspertian1105]

I wonder why Rockwell can get better parts than this. If its his agent or him but he is not making smart career choices. After Iron Man 2 (which i didn't like, but he was great in it), I don't think he has made the smartest choices

 

[MadVillainy]

I wonder why Rockwell can get better parts than this. If its his agent or him but he is not making smart career choices. After Iron Man 2 (which i didn't like, but he was great in it), I don't think he has made the smartest choices

It's probably hard for him.

Cant say for sure, but I bet he's not getting offered the best parts

 

[Jaspertian1105]

It's probably hard for him.

Cant say for sure, but I bet he's not getting offered the best parts

How is that possible? he is arguably one of the best actors working today, it cant be for a lack of talent

 

[Octoberist]

He's like Ethan Hawke: Great at choosing roles for indie movies, but all over the map when it comes to more mainstream stuff.

 

[MadVillainy]

How is that possible? he is arguably one of the best actors working today, it cant be for a lack of talent

There are loads of talented actors who don't get a lot of work. It's not a matter of talent all the time.

 

[Jaspertian1105]

There are loads of talented actors who don't get a lot of work. It's not a matter of talent all the time.

Thats a shame, and yeah Hawke suffers the same fate. Maybe they don't feel comfortable with big sets and **** load of cameras and effects. Not every actor is made for those parts

 

[MadVillainy]

I still wish Ethan Hawke was chosen to play Doctor Strange

 

[Jaspertian1105]

I still wish Ethan Hawke was chosen to play Doctor Strange

He looked more the part, and already has rocked the goatee many times before. Im a fan of Cumberbatch but he has to be careful not getting too over exposed. The casting of that movie are getting really strange (no pun intended) if those rumors of the ancient one are true

 

[chamber-music]

This film was a lot more comedic than than I expected.

Madison left far less of an impression than Carol Anne did

 

[Thundercrack85]

Just saw it. Actually thought it was okay as a standalone movie. Nothing great. Nothing horrible. It's not the Conjuring good, but it's not Dark Skies bad. It has all the tropes, which the original popularized. Even if you've only seen Family Guy jokes of it, you probably know what's going to happen.

I considered Insidious to be a modern remake of Poltergeist personally. Which love it or hate it, was a fairly memorable flick. So, this movie seemed rather unnecessary. But it's worth a watch on a boring Sunday.

I think this one will be doomed to obscurity, but I think it's unfair to call it terrible. It just doesn't live up to the classic Spielberg film, but that's quite a movie to live up to.

 

[Spiderine]

At least in this one they didn't waste their time getting their asses out of that house once they got the girl. Or at least tried to.

 

[Thundercrack85]

Well I've noticed in several of these movies the family being in bad shape financially is a reoccurring theme. Which explains why they can't just up and move. That sort of bothered me in Insidious, where the dad who has a decent job, but clearly isn't rich and is the sole breadwinner is just able to move his family. Twice. To really nice houses.

 

[Teelie]

I wrote up a commentary as I watched this today. I was bored and figured I'd try my hand at something to keep me entertained. This is the result.

Watching the Poltergeist remake now. I started this around 20 minutes in so it might be slightly jumbled initially.

So far the scariest thing we've seen is Ghost House Picture's logo, and if you're afraid of them (I know some people are) a bunch of clown dolls (a zombie game in the car on the way to the house the kid is playing isn't impressively scary either unless you are afraid of mid 90's game graphics).

We learn the father is a laid off John Deere (inserted advertisement, why else use a real company name?) worker and the mother is a writer who is struggling to... write. He's quick to say how his former employer John Deere is great and all but they had no choice but to do cut backs and lay-offs.

I guess the executives weren't profiting in enough millions to afford that second summer house on some rich island that year.

As the family wanders about the house the youngest daughter talks to her imaginary friends in the closet of one room, which has some doors that just will not open. The realtor shrugs this off as just being stuck because it rained a few weeks ago.

Way to sell that house.

The old tree that has been there since before the houses is the obvious set up going on and sure enough it "eats" the baseball when the father tries and fails to bond with his kid and scares the little boy, who we learn is afraid of absolutely everything. Like, everything scares this boy.

There is a washer/dryer combo that leaks a black sludge, something I'd have been more concerned with but the mother just shrugs off as though it was not a big deal. Black sludge usually means sewage and I'd hate to be the one to pay for fixing a cracked sewer line.

Later that night the kids are going to bed, we have the teenage daughter on the phone talking to a friend while watching TV when the future Zelda Rubenstein played by what appears to be a fake psychic comes on. She and her friend love his show and start watching it.

The boy is afraid of the dark and needs a night light. Nothing unusual there for a kid his age but then the noises start and he's scared so he runs to get his parents who are just about to get it on.

He runs into their room and gets daddy. Turns out there was a squirrel up in the attic that got into his room. This means no sexy time for the parents.

Those ghosts are some real [censored] blockers if that squirrel is anything to go by. You just know they are responsible for it scaring that kid at precisely that moment.

Not that I was expecting horrific scenes right off the bat but I was expecting a bit more ominous than a stuck closet door and a box full of junk someone left behind with a crazed squirrel subbing in for a bat or rat or cat the other usual suspects. Anyone else notice that it's always some animal whose name ends in "at" that's behind a jump scare?

With this whole house being wired up (because the previous owner was a "technophile" according to the realtor from earlier) many electrical problems like the TV coming on at random and some of the noises (the house is wired with speakers too so you can listen to music/the screams of the damned in surround sound through the the house) could be attributed to crappy wiring and/or shorts in the system. The little girl is now communicating with the television much like she previously did with the closet, stuff that can be chalked up to a kid's imagination.

This scene at least has a nice touch of all the hands coming up to the television from the inside but it quickly becomes silly with so many of them, and then the brother tries to unplug the TV and gets shocked while the little girl says the famous "they're here" line weakly and without the touch of Heather O'Rourke who played Carol Anne.

Nothing so far has impressed me although the rather grisly discovery of a human vertebrae was downplayed a little too causually.

At the store to buy some stuff the father tries but fails twice to use a credit card (they're maxed out) before finally finding one that works. An embarassing situation to be sure.

Gotta feel for the father. He's been laid off, his credit cards are over the limit and his kids are nightmares. He can't even have intimate time with his wife without children and/or squirrels invading his bedroom.

And back to the boy whose comic book collection stands in for the stacked chairs scene from the original movie with them being a house of comics as opposed to a house of cards before blowing away and scaring him (which to be fair, should be a bit scary to anyone unaccustomed to self-stacking comic books).

The eldest daughter, a teenager needs a new phone. Her's broke and she blames the brother. Why? Because we don't know about poltergeists yet.

Everyone in this family has a problem we learn. The mother calls the boy who is the middle kid a baby which offends him, the eldest daughter is the stereotypical teenage girl who absolutely needs her phone or she'll die without it. The littlest daughter is noisy and the scared-of-everything son is ignored by the father, who just goes and blows a lot of money they don't have on presents for everyone after the previous embarassing scene in the store.

New phone for the daughter, a drone for the son (we can see where this is going) new jewelry for the wife for their dinner party that night. Just expensive as hell presents he'll regret purchasing later.

At the dinner party with the parents they learn the housing complex used to be on a cemetary and their host jokes "at least it's not an ancient burial ground" which practically invites the poltergeists to come in and piss all over his house instead.

Seriously. They should go over and haunt his ass for a weekend and see how funny it is.

Right away we learn the developers were supposed to have moved the graves along with the headstones but we know how well they accomplished that task or else we wouldn't have a movie.

Even outside a movie I'd be impressed to find an actual situation where they didn't somehow bungle this job and just pretend to do it moving only the headstone and no graves.

This is why if I ever discover I'm living on a former cemetary I'm moving the hell out and calling in a priest, a shaman, buddhist, and whatever other kind of religious purification I can to cleanse it of any bad mojo.

Anyhow back in the movie the teenager is talking to one of her friends (because she's a teenage girl and always talking to a friend) when funny stuff with the electrical appliances starts happening. Her phone acts up, she runs into the laundry room where no good can come.

We get more black sludge erupting out of the floor with the oldest daughter being attacked by a hand coming out of it to grab her ankle as a tree limb scares the little boy banging on a skylight. The kid for once has something to be afraid of. A rabid acting squirrel caught in a cage, puttering feet moving around, seeing all the clown dolls are moving from their original place. Nothing too scary or outside the purview of a Scooby-Doo villian but scary enough if you're 10.

This movie might have some scares in it afterall.

The little girl's room is being haunted by the tree as well. The boy goes in there only to run off when he sees hell breaking loose as all the doors in the house firmly shut closed. He makes a break for the stairs only to get froze in the most ridiculous pose that would result in him breaking something falling down the stairs. There is no way he should have been positioned as he was to go down the stairs. Luckily for him the "evil" tree saves his stupid butt by grabbing him and hanging him from one of its branches. Maybe these ghosts aren't so bad afterall... or they just don't want his spirit roaming the same grounds as them.

At this point it occured to me there has been no explanation as to why the spirits want to take the little girl. This movie quickly goes from an annoying, quirky house to full-blown haunting in a matter of minutes.

Back to the little girl and the ghosts possessing her pig/unicorn doll and sending her into the closet/purgatory where she is promptly kidnapped. As the parents come home from their rather dull and fortunately short-lived party they find their son hanging in the tree screaming for help.

The oldest daughter comes running outside literally blubbering some unintelligable things and then comes the ominous "I can't find Maddy!" (the youngest girl). This is probably meant to scare the parents in the audience who would dread losing one of their children but to everyone else feels like another moment of staged tension.

Frantic search through the house yields nothing but the boy hears/sees Maddie in the television. Their little girl is on television now. Or in the television. We see the hand touching through the television screen again but it is less dramatic this time around.

That morning the mother goes to the local college to discuss the situation with the Paranormal research department after a brief debate over calling the police. Realistically, what do you tell the police? That your daughter has been eaten by the closet upstairs?

Part two is next. Who knew there was a character limit on posts? 20,000 is it and I managed to clock in nearly 21,000 characters.

 

[Teelie]

And here is part two. I tried to cut this review thing in the middle and it looks like it was close.

The paranormal scooby squad (the professor of the paranormal research department and two grade students) get their first taste of the mischeviousness of the ghosts. Static shock on the bannister, the chair being pulled and thrown from under one of them.

Gross, the father is puking worms and dirt after taking a swig of alcohol. Another homage to the original movie that doesn't quite work.

Strangely, the one scooby who had a chair pulled from under him despite no one being near is also the skeptical one. He thinks (perhaps wisely given any other time) this is a staged "haunting" and the out of work father is trying to snag a reality tv show.

Skeptic is in the scary closet that ate the little girl now to put a temperature gauge in there. Any bets on something "scary" happening here? Tapping the wall, it's solid then another tap and a hollow spot so he goes to drill a hole for the gauge, only the drill's battery is dead so he plugs into the wall with a cord. Where the drill and his hand promptly fly through the wall and the drill gets taken into it, cord and all.

A wise man might get a flashlight and carefully look where he's sticking his hand. This guy just peers into the dark and sticks his hand in there. Finding it he thinks he's going to just yank it out but nope, it grabs him instead and then proceeds to turn out by itself.

We see the heat sensor meant to tell us of ghosts plummet down in temperature quickly from somewhere in the 70's to the 30's or lower.

Where will the drill go? In his hand that is being caught up behind the wall? Nope. In his head where he's stuck against the wall? Nope. Through the wall a foot from his head with the drill bit progressively keeps coming out closer and closer to his face before he is safely released at the last second to stand away from the closet while he replaces the pants he has no doubt now **** all in.

His arm is freed and the wall is now completely intact, no drill holes, no giant hole where his hand was, and the drill with cord safely on this side of the closet. He notices his arm has black marks on it where he has been grabbed. Or not as they mysteriously vanish without a trace.

He walks down the stairs where the professor inquires whether the sensor is in place to which he responds "sort of" only to be rebuked to take this more seriously because nearly getting drilled to death by a ghost is such a slacker move. He doesn't bother explaining what happens to his professor, who might be interested in the very real haunting going on there and it isn't Casper.

We now have the part where we talk with the girl in the television and lots of noise and shadow play seeing her silhouette but little else.

The father thinking he's going to see his daughter upstairs finds her seemingly in a corner only it's some kind of masked apparition with an uncanny valley face.

Going bananas he breaks into the closet wall with a table and pisses off the ghosts. We see an electrical thing forming above the group downstairs as a piece of furniture comes through the ceiling nearly landing on the kid.

Finally, well into the movie (one hour mark) we get to Burke, the paranormal huckster we saw on television almost 45 minutes ago prior when the daughter was on her first phone yakking it up. He is on one of those cheap reality television shows which turns out to be genuine afterall.

We see that sewage problem was left untreated and now converted the laundry room into a stinking mud pit as the ghost whispering psychic investigates the house.

Burke starts to ask questions about the girl, quickly going to "I see dead people" levels that their daughter is psychic just like he is. And he confirms the obvious: the developers only moved the headstones, not the bodies so there are hundreds of pissed off ghosts wandering the premisis.

The ghosts see the little girl and her purity of spirit (being only a child) as a literal light in the darkness to help them get to where they need to go (although why they didn't go there sooner is not explained). Seriously. This house was built in the 1990's yet in 2015 they are still around haunting the place not having moved on or really caused much of a ruckus before then.

After explainging this to the family, the father suddenly becomes skeptical again. All the **** he's seen, his daughter is trapped in a television, now is the time he doubts the guy who clearly knows what he's talking about? They called this man in, now is not the time to doubt him.

GPS trackers now to track everyone in the house. Okay. Except that GPS trackers aren't quite that accurate, especially not inside a house where they can't get a good signal but whatever. We're dealing with ghosts.

Mr Ghost Hunter Burke has many battle scars from fighting ghosts in his years. Some are kind of serious looking like his leg being all mangled by some spirit in South America.

We now learn the professor who called in Burke the ghost hunter was briefly married to him. That's a bit of an uncomfortable conversation to stumble into. I feel sorry for the wife who accidently discovered that tidbit.

Moving on we come to the part where they have to rescue the girl from the ghosts by going into the purgatory she's trapped in. The rules are different, no up, no down, no straight lines. We'll send in a drone which relies on those very principals of gravity to navigate. What could go wrong?

Now we get somewhere slightly scary, where we can see some of the lost souls who are trapped here. But only in flickering glimpses. They didn't want to blow the budget on a lot of ghosts but they wanted us to know they were here.

The infrared camera one of the Scoobys has shows us where the kid is in our reality while still trapped in purgatory. Calling out to her we get her electronically distorted voice like we see in all those crappy low budget "found footage" type movies with other ghosts.

And the girl is grabbed by a ghost and screams and disappears. So now people are losing their cool arguing over who goes in to rescue her and it's the scared of everything brother who we see thanks to the GPS tracker on the monitor.

Guilt is a powerful thing as he yells he should never have left her alone and jumps into the void...

Burke the ghost whisperer attempts to talk the ghosts into letting the kids go and that they mean them no harm which is kind of moot. They are ghosts, they're already dead. Not much more you can do to harm them. The kids on the otherhand are still very much alive so maybe be so kind as to let them keep living.

Thanks to modern technology lacking in 1982 we get to see what goes on with the two children in purgatory via the drone's camera whereas in the original movie we kind of had a wait and see thing until they suddenly got spit out.

This place is a distorted version of the house and constant dark with the occasional flicker of electricity to keep it from just a black screen with no idea what's happening.

Then we see the girl, or do we? She's in shadow... but it is her and herbrother tells them they have to go now although the girl is afraid to leave. Looking up, you see a lot of ghosts. That's a lot of unfinished business going on in this graveyard. We still don't know why so many hundreds of spirits are haunting this particular place. Like was the graveyard for people with unfinished business? As we're told that only those who have unfinished business hang around here still.

They pull the rope all the way out with no kids attached only for them to get spit out with ectoplasm and unconcious seconds later.

Dunking them in the water and cleaning off the goop seems to have woken them up.

And now to get the hell out of Dodge in a van.

End of the movie, right? Nope. Still have 15 minutes to go. We get the ghost whisperer's "this house is clean!" line and the little girl saying it isn't clean because the movie's run time is one hour and forty one minutes, not one hour and twenty six. This means something is going to happen.

The ghosts didn't make it into the light so naturally they won't let the family go either. Forcefully as it turns out by destroying the vehicle's engine then flipping the van on it's back and pulling it into the house.

I wonder if their home owners or car insurance is going to cover this one. Once again they steal the kid up the stairs to the closet. This is round two.

Giant sucking vortex of doom is no match for a mother's grip on her kid. And just to be extra safe all the family joins in while the scariest part yet of the ghosts grabbing for the little girl come out of the closet into our world and try to take her.

An impressive if brief scene.

Meanwhile the ghost whisperer says some stuff from outside and they suddenly let go. But the house is slowly imploding. Not very quickly like the first movie but it's still going.

Burke is the only one who can actually save the family and he's dropping the side show act. He's getting real now and goes inside the house to do some true cleaning.

Teenage daughter has had enough of this ghostly hands **** in the TV and stomps it on the ground as we see yet again hands coming up into the television screen. At least she apologized for being "a *****" (her words) to her father as he drags her away outside and then we see Burke go into purgatory making the dramatic sacrifice.

Skeletal remains pop up out of the black goop in the driveway to give another scare and show just how impressive their special effects are. Maybe I am too jaded but while it was well executed it did not unnerve me let alone scare me.

Remarkably none of the neighbors in the cul-de-sac wake up to see what all this ruckus is about despite the house literally exploding into blinding white light and what seems like a tornado flying through the neighborhood pulling stuff all over the place.

As the family escapes we see fire and police vehicles making their way to the scene, completely ignoring the fleeing vehicle that clearly came from the direction of the disturbance.

As we see the destruction from outside where the emergency services are trying to figure out how to write this one up it appears the neighbors finally decided to see what the fuss was about. Looking for Burke on their monitor the Scoobys find a signal so he's not dead or at least his GPS tracker isn't.

Later at an unspecified time we see the family looking at a new house where the realtor brags on the closet space and shows them the tree that's older than the house. Deja vu?

The new house is too much like the old house so the family flees leaving one very confused realtor unsure of what just happened.

And that's the end... except the stinger where we see Burke doing his thing on camera and his professor ex-wife walks into the frame and totally ruins the shot. Of course he made it out alive and is back on television with her joining him.

Happy ending for everyone. We assume at least. Ghost Whisperer must have put those souls at ease to have escaped.

Roll credits, roll eyes, roll a joint. Roll whatever floats your boat. This movie is cleansed.

2.5/5 I've seen worse, I've seen better and I see how this could have been better but it wasn't awful either. Disappointing, flat. It had nice effects but they held back too much.

 

[Mike_D202]

The new house at the end was actually the house from the original "Poltergeist" movie. The sports team bumper sticker the vehicle had on the car after they moved to the town was the name of the director of the original (Hooper).

 

[Teelie]

I read about that bumper sticker easter egg too. There are several call backs (including suggesting the father becoming a high school Coach as a new job). Nice touches but this movie was an unnecessary remake. It took the original movie's events, stuck them in a blender then spit them out into a mess and missing a few pieces explaining the plot more clearly.

They give away the "twist" midway into the movie where it was revealed nearer the end of the original, they reinvent some of the original haunting scenes and actually improved a few but nothing special happens.

If I had not seen the original movie I probably would have been confused and given it a lower rating because it felt so incoherent. That is the worst offense this remake made: It tried too hard to be recognizable to the original movie fans without doing anything new itself and failed to bring in a new audience.

The most original parts of the remake are how the whole house was technologically modern (something otherwise irrelevant as we never see that prominently featured outside a flatscreen television) and it used a drone to search for Carol Anne Maddie. Something the father bought the kid after they had already moved in. And the scene with the drill where absolutely nothing happens.

Everything else could have happened in virtually any decade since the 1940's.