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Poltergeist:
First, some context. I don't care about the original Poltergeist. I don't dislike it, I just don't care about it. I think I saw it once multiple years ago. I thought it was okay and it left no impression on me. This might be controversial for a self-proclaimed horror aficionado to say, but if you showed me a random scene from the original I would probably just call it The Exorcist Junior and walk away. In casual conversation I will usually refer to it as "the not Spielberg movie". I think in this case that is a good thing. I can and will judge this movie on its own merits. All I will say about the original is that if this remake was very similar to it, that might be the most overrated horror classic ever. I don't know how many of the same plot points, scenes, or scares are borrowed, but this is bad. Some of it comes down to the execution, but a lot of the ideas present here are flawed too, or at least quite dated.
In this movie, a white "middle class" (the father recently got laid off from his job and the mother is stay at home, but they can afford a 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood because the plot says so) family moves into a new suburban neighborhood, but soon find out that the house was actually built on top of an ancient burial ground. This is such a weird cliche for paranormal horror to keep going after. I don't think I've ever heard of a real life house on top of a burial ground, but apparently they're a dime a dozen under houses as long as they're being moved into by a happy white family. The Bowen family, made up of two parents who have love for their kids and 3 stereotypes in place of actual kids (a teenager addicted to technology, a little boy who others treat as a sissy, and a little girl who exists), have to confront a type of violent ghost called a poltergeist when their house starts acting weird. Because it's a horror movie about a family, the kids are spooked but their skeptic parents think they're just gosh darned kids until the second act. Sam Rockwell was decent in this, in the Sam Rockwell way that makes you wish he picked slightly better projects. Saxon Sharbino was also okay as the teenage daughter. Her career credits include indie horror and exploitation horrorporn, both of which she has effectively grown out of with this. Every other actor is bad. I don't want to be mean to the kids, because they're both under 10, but I will hold no punches for Rosemarie DeWitt's no-effort performance. The dialogue provided isn't A material, but DeWitt is so wooden that she deserves the bulk of the blame for it. You would think that having a child abducted by some unseen entity would make you feel an emotion, but DeWitt refuses to be bound by your expectations.
Sam Raimi is a name that was featured in marketing, but he only produces the film and likely had very little real involvement. That shouldn't be such a bad thing. If you asked me who I would want to direct an Exorcist Junior, I would have requested Gil Kenan, and that's who got the job. Kenan is the director of Monster House, the only horror movie to ever be Oscar nominated for Best Animated Feature and probably the best junior horror movie ever. It was clever, it was original, it was fun, and it genuinely scared me when I saw it in theaters as an 8 or 9 year old. Kenan hasn't done anything in 7 years, and it shows, although maybe he did have a decent vision mucked up by studio meddling. I can give the storyline a get out of cliche free past because it's based on a story that existed before it was cliche, but I can't say the same for filmmaking techniques. As the worst ones usually do, not only are there plenty of jump scares, but every scare has an obvious setup to allow the viewer to tell themselves that a jump scare is about to come. The sound drains, the screen pans slowly, you say "And then the jump", the jump happens, and you tense your shoulders a little bit. There was one scary moment, and it came without any kind of surprise or visual or sonic jump. The paranormal investigator friend of a friend has his arm stuck in a door and nails pop out towards him from behind it. There's no obnoxious musical accompaniment, we just get some good, old-fashioned tension building. It's the best scene in the movie because it understands how to scare us on a deeper level so well.
Also of note for being poorly executed is an excess of CGI in the third act. Usually this mainstream jump scare horror style is indicative of microbudget horror, but that's an unfair designation. Poltergeist cost $35M to make, and you see that money on the screen. For the effects they wanted, they probably needed a budget increase. There are a lot of zombies that come up from cracks in floors and trans dimensional portals, and every shot looks poorly greenscreened like it was from 2007.
This is the kind of mediocre movie that doesn't give you a great impression, so here are some assorted thoughts that aren't really fleshed out but are worth mentioning. The scare approach to this one is rapid fire. I counted at least 7 obvious attempts to scare in the first 20 minutes. It's a nice effort to making true horror, but so few of them hit their mark that it makes it groan worthy when you see something like a hand on the back of the husband with jump music only to find his wife behind him. There's no real tension created in anything but the nail scene. It's a few seconds of buildup at most, and then onto the next one. The ratio of effective scares to unintentionally hilarious scares is not strong with this. I think the little boy's acting might have been part of the problem, but basically every scene where he gets attacked by something is way more funny than it should have been. Am I weird for laughing out loud when the clown toy was gnawing on his leg? It was such an absurd scene, and the clown's face gets kicked off and still moves its eyes. The whole situation is goofy. He gets attacked by a tree, which the movie makes obvious by having multiple scenes with no purpose other than establishing that the tree is evil in what should probably be considered foreshadowing abuse. It gave me good time to come up with Whomping Willow jokes, but it was ineffective at its function. I'm surprised that this got away with a PG-13. The tone is definitely not adult in the traditional sense, but the gore level is moderate and they use the S word 7 times, which I thought was a lot. There's also an awkward dry humping scene that a kid walks in on where nothing explicit is shown but it's not subtle about being sexual. Good for the MPAA for judging a movie based off of its context and intended audience instead of using arbitrary swear limits. The UK rating was a 15, which seems fair to me. This is why an intermediate rating in America is necessary. Staying true to a 13 year old limit should be fine, but if you're a parent I wouldn't take kids under 10 the way the original Poltergesit apparently appealed to 7 year olds. There is a strange rushed subplot near the end of the movie about the paranormal researcher's desire to finish his biggest case even though his significant other thinks it's hurting his health. Neither one of these characters does or says much of any importance. Somebody tell me if that was in the original too, because to me it seemed that it was Straight Outta Conjuring in a desperate attempt to rip off the best supernatural horror movie of the past decade. Like most bad remakes, there is absolutely no reason to watch it. If you like the original, you'll complain about the minor changes and lesser quality here. If you don't like the original, there's nothing here to convert you. If you've never seen the original, watch that instead of this and pick an above camp.
Poltergeist:
First, some context. I don't care about the original Poltergeist. I don't dislike it, I just don't care about it. I think I saw it once multiple years ago. I thought it was okay and it left no impression on me. This might be controversial for a self-proclaimed horror aficionado to say, but if you showed me a random scene from the original I would probably just call it The Exorcist Junior and walk away. In casual conversation I will usually refer to it as "the not Spielberg movie". I think in this case that is a good thing. I can and will judge this movie on its own merits. All I will say about the original is that if this remake was very similar to it, that might be the most overrated horror classic ever. I don't know how many of the same plot points, scenes, or scares are borrowed, but this is bad. Some of it comes down to the execution, but a lot of the ideas present here are flawed too, or at least quite dated.
In this movie, a white "middle class" (the father recently got laid off from his job and the mother is stay at home, but they can afford a 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood because the plot says so) family moves into a new suburban neighborhood, but soon find out that the house was actually built on top of an ancient burial ground. This is such a weird cliche for paranormal horror to keep going after. I don't think I've ever heard of a real life house on top of a burial ground, but apparently they're a dime a dozen under houses as long as they're being moved into by a happy white family. The Bowen family, made up of two parents who have love for their kids and 3 stereotypes in place of actual kids (a teenager addicted to technology, a little boy who others treat as a sissy, and a little girl who exists), have to confront a type of violent ghost called a poltergeist when their house starts acting weird. Because it's a horror movie about a family, the kids are spooked but their skeptic parents think they're just gosh darned kids until the second act. Sam Rockwell was decent in this, in the Sam Rockwell way that makes you wish he picked slightly better projects. Saxon Sharbino was also okay as the teenage daughter. Her career credits include indie horror and exploitation horrorporn, both of which she has effectively grown out of with this. Every other actor is bad. I don't want to be mean to the kids, because they're both under 10, but I will hold no punches for Rosemarie DeWitt's no-effort performance. The dialogue provided isn't A material, but DeWitt is so wooden that she deserves the bulk of the blame for it. You would think that having a child abducted by some unseen entity would make you feel an emotion, but DeWitt refuses to be bound by your expectations.
Sam Raimi is a name that was featured in marketing, but he only produces the film and likely had very little real involvement. That shouldn't be such a bad thing. If you asked me who I would want to direct an Exorcist Junior, I would have requested Gil Kenan, and that's who got the job. Kenan is the director of Monster House, the only horror movie to ever be Oscar nominated for Best Animated Feature and probably the best junior horror movie ever. It was clever, it was original, it was fun, and it genuinely scared me when I saw it in theaters as an 8 or 9 year old. Kenan hasn't done anything in 7 years, and it shows, although maybe he did have a decent vision mucked up by studio meddling. I can give the storyline a get out of cliche free past because it's based on a story that existed before it was cliche, but I can't say the same for filmmaking techniques. As the worst ones usually do, not only are there plenty of jump scares, but every scare has an obvious setup to allow the viewer to tell themselves that a jump scare is about to come. The sound drains, the screen pans slowly, you say "And then the jump", the jump happens, and you tense your shoulders a little bit. There was one scary moment, and it came without any kind of surprise or visual or sonic jump. The paranormal investigator friend of a friend has his arm stuck in a door and nails pop out towards him from behind it. There's no obnoxious musical accompaniment, we just get some good, old-fashioned tension building. It's the best scene in the movie because it understands how to scare us on a deeper level so well.
Also of note for being poorly executed is an excess of CGI in the third act. Usually this mainstream jump scare horror style is indicative of microbudget horror, but that's an unfair designation. Poltergeist cost $35M to make, and you see that money on the screen. For the effects they wanted, they probably needed a budget increase. There are a lot of zombies that come up from cracks in floors and trans dimensional portals, and every shot looks poorly greenscreened like it was from 2007.
This is the kind of mediocre movie that doesn't give you a great impression, so here are some assorted thoughts that aren't really fleshed out but are worth mentioning. The scare approach to this one is rapid fire. I counted at least 7 obvious attempts to scare in the first 20 minutes. It's a nice effort to making true horror, but so few of them hit their mark that it makes it groan worthy when you see something like a hand on the back of the husband with jump music only to find his wife behind him. There's no real tension created in anything but the nail scene. It's a few seconds of buildup at most, and then onto the next one. The ratio of effective scares to unintentionally hilarious scares is not strong with this. I think the little boy's acting might have been part of the problem, but basically every scene where he gets attacked by something is way more funny than it should have been. Am I weird for laughing out loud when the clown toy was gnawing on his leg? It was such an absurd scene, and the clown's face gets kicked off and still moves its eyes. The whole situation is goofy. He gets attacked by a tree, which the movie makes obvious by having multiple scenes with no purpose other than establishing that the tree is evil in what should probably be considered foreshadowing abuse. It gave me good time to come up with Whomping Willow jokes, but it was ineffective at its function. I'm surprised that this got away with a PG-13. The tone is definitely not adult in the traditional sense, but the gore level is moderate and they use the S word 7 times, which I thought was a lot. There's also an awkward dry humping scene that a kid walks in on where nothing explicit is shown but it's not subtle about being sexual. Good for the MPAA for judging a movie based off of its context and intended audience instead of using arbitrary swear limits. The UK rating was a 15, which seems fair to me. This is why an intermediate rating in America is necessary. Staying true to a 13 year old limit should be fine, but if you're a parent I wouldn't take kids under 10 the way the original Poltergesit apparently appealed to 7 year olds. There is a strange rushed subplot near the end of the movie about the paranormal researcher's desire to finish his biggest case even though his significant other thinks it's hurting his health. Neither one of these characters does or says much of any importance. Somebody tell me if that was in the original too, because to me it seemed that it was Straight Outta Conjuring in a desperate attempt to rip off the best supernatural horror movie of the past decade. Like most bad remakes, there is absolutely no reason to watch it. If you like the original, you'll complain about the minor changes and lesser quality here. If you don't like the original, there's nothing here to convert you. If you've never seen the original, watch that instead of this and pick an above camp.