The Poltergeist – Model of bad horror

Quickie Review:

A family looking for a new beginning moves into a suburban home. Evil forces take control of the house, threatening the lives of the inhabitants. When the youngest daughter is abducted by evil spirits, the family must come together to find a way to rescue her. The Poltergeist is the least scary movie in recent times. This remake offers nothing new and repeats the clichés originally set by the 1980s Poltergeist. The acting overall is decent, and Sam Rockwell did liven up the movie with his charm. Yet performances alone could not save this disaster of a horror film, bursting at the seams with mediocre CGI. Skip this one.

Full Review:

As a horror fan, I am ever hopeful to find a good scare once in a while to get my heart pumping. I guess I like being kept awake at night fearing things that don’t exist. Well The Poltergeist, got me to do the exact opposite, go to bed like little baby and enjoy a long hibernation.

Before I get all ranty, I should mention the good aspect of the movie, the performances. The parents played by Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt had believable chemistry with each other and the children. Sam Rockwell is awesome as always, bringing in his own personality to the character. That helped with bringing some levity into the movie so we aren’t drowning in over-dramatic tension. Even the child actors were decent. Sure one of them was the clichéd child talking to ghosts, but there was also another kid who reacted to anomalies like a real human pre-teen would react: scared out of his freaking mind! So at least the characters were mostly relatable.

If you want the definition of a bad horror movie, actually even worse, a bad horror remake then look no further. Remakes should be made to capture the spirit (pun intended) of the original while trying to do something new. This movie is exactly the same as the original. Moreover, the original is a classic because it did something new for that time. It did it so well that other horror movies started to copy the 80s Poltergeist. So when you film a remake without making any significant changes, not only is it bland because it is a copy of the original, it’s boring because it’s rehashes all the horror clichés that have propagated since the 80s. So much so that I knew exactly when and where the next scare was coming from. The only thing new about the movie is the use of computer generated ghouls, and they couldn’t even get that right. The quality of the CGI was poor to begin with, but there is such over-reliance on them that it progressively gets worse. Eventually they are all an amalgamation of random mediocre video game creatures that you don’t care about because nothing feels real. So the one new thing they tried drained all the horror out of the movie.

Fans of the original classic will hate this movie, horror fans will hate this movie, so I don’t who they are trying to target this movie towards. Sure the performance of the actors were good, but the overflow of horror clichés and crappy CGI is too much to bear. Worst of all, it was not scary.