POLTERGEIST (Gil Kenan). 93 minutes. Now playing. See listing. Rating: NN
Where to watch: iTunes
You can throw Gil Kenan’s Poltergeist onto the pile of utterly unnecessary 21st century remakes of beloved 80s properties. Like last year’s retooled RoboCop, it demonstrates how well the original movie holds up: every change played on the plot and characters has a way of reducing the overall effect.
The basic structure is the same. A family moves into a suburban home only to be set upon by a malevolent presence fixated on their youngest daughter. Stepping in for JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson, Rosemarie DeWitt and Sam Rockwell do a fine job of establishing a comfortably broken-in relationship before the spook show gets under way – but after that it’s all just running and shouting amidst increasingly elaborate special effects as the restless spirits nab little Maddie (Kennedi Clements) and the family turns to an academic (Jane Adams) and a TV spiritualist (Jared Harris) for help.
Almost half an hour shorter than the original but still trying to cram in most of the plot, Poltergeist 2015 nevertheless insists on including several of the deliberately paced shock scenes now in vogue thanks to the Paranormal Activity and Insidious movies – which gives us time to think about how much more effective the first Insidious was at repurposing the plot of Poltergeist 1982 than screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire’s work here.
But even when it sticks to the original text, the movie can’t get anything right. Director Kenan – whose 2006 CG animated feature Monster House felt like a pretty good demo reel for a Poltergeist remake – botches proven shocks like the tree, the clown doll and one character’s graphic hallucination by finding less interesting ways to shoot them than Tobe Hooper did the first time around, and the revised finale feels like a last-minute reshoot.
Maybe it is. Honestly, by that point I’d stopped thinking too much about anything on the screen. I was wondering whether the original was available on Netflix.
It isn’t. But the Blu-ray’s really good.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
