Review by Dustin Hall
This is a few weeks late. Sad but true, no one on the BAH staff really wanted to use their time to watch this one. Someone, though, had to take one for the team, and it was me. After being held back for nearly five years, like a school year bully, the new Poltergeist fulfills a lot of peoples’ expectations about it, and not in a positive way. Basically, with this flick having been out in the theaters for about three weeks now, its a bit late to tell you whether or not to see the film, but if you haven’t yet, allow me to assure you, you didn’t miss anything.
That being the case, let’s not spend a lot of time selling the benefits of the film or decrying its faults in order to sell the film or deter you from it. Rather, I’d like to ponder exactly what the filmmakers were thinking in re-making this film. It completely eludes me. Typically in Raimi I trust, and with him as a producer, I was really hoping that there would be some new flourishes, some creative visuals, physical stunt work, and uniquely dark humor. But if at any point Raimi’s Midas touch was in the film, it was harshly excised on the way to the screen. And while most upcoming directors (this is Gil Kenan’s third film) might want to use new technology to wow us with great visual effects impossible in the original, this installment deliberately avoids any sequences that might be set pieces for such spectacle, with the exception of our brief look into the realm of the dead. What we’re left with is a completely bland, flavorless, voiceless film bereft of interest or any distinguishable purpose. It’s as though the entire creation of the film hinged upon some studio exec being stoned and thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if the guys from Ghost Hunters made it into the house from Poltergeist?’, and then ten years after that show’s relevance had passed, this movie got shat out.
It’s gotten to the point where most of the horror films in Hollywood can’t even attract horror fans, hasn’t it? Most fans cringe at the mere sight of another remake, reboot, or found footage film, and yet here we are, blessed with this, and then the upcoming first person The Gallows. I’m not even a fan of the Insidious franchise, but by comparison to this scare-less, lifeless corpse of a film, it seems goddamn refreshing. Sitting in the theater full of noisy, theater-hopping, vaping tweens who kept exclaiming ‘Aw Hell naw!” every time a ghost doll appeared on screen and got absolutely none of the references to the original films shoe-horned into this reboot, I really had to wonder who was to blame for it all. The assholes watching the film with me, giving it money for cheap attempts at scares? The studio execs who green-lit the damn thing, hoping to wring dollars out of a beloved old franchise? Or we hardcore horror fans for not coming out in droves to see good horror to help it out-gross these lowest common denominator bastardizations?
Either way, Sam Rockwell, I love you, but you’re in a terrible movie. I’m going to go kill myself now and haunt the next tenant of my apartment. It’ll be a more enjoyable experience.
Assuming you still want to see it, Poltergeist is in cinemas now.