Poltergeist (2015)

Director: Gil Kenan
Screenplay: David Lindsay-Abaire
Stars: Sam Rockwell (Eric Bowen), Rosemarie DeWitt (Amy Bowen), Saxon Sharbino (Kendra Bowen), Kyle Catlett (Griffin Bowen), Kennedi Clements (Madison Bowen), Jared Harris (Carrigan Burke), Jane Adams (Dr. Brooke Powell), Susan Heyward (Sophie), Nicholas Braun (Boyd), Karen Ivany (Mrs. Stoller), Patrick Garrow (Mr. Stoller)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.Poltergeist
PoltergeistGil Kenan’s remake of Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper’s Reagan-era horror classic Poltergeist is not a completely worthless endeavor, but it comes awfully close. The film’s various delays and multiple release dates suggest a great deal of postproduction tinkering, a feeling that is all but confirmed in watching the film, which hustles through the same basic scenario in just over 90 minutes without providing any evidence that a retread of this ground is even remotely necessary. Screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (Rise of the Guardians) puts plenty of new spins on the familiar beats of the story, but their relevance must have wound up somewhere on the cutting room floor.

We might begin with the way the film changes the family’s financial situation. While the original film centered on an upper-middle-class suburban family whose financial stability was literally built on the bodies of others, the new Poltergeist gives us the Bowen family, who are in the midst of a drastic forced downsizing amid the great recession of a few years ago. Husband and father Eric (Sam Rockwell), a former star college athlete, has been let go from his corporate job, while his wife Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) has elected to stay at home to pursue a currently going-nowhere writing career. Their lack of income has forced them to move to a smaller, somewhat shabby two-story suburban house in a neighborhood full of foreclosures that backs up to a field of ugly electric power lines. The connection of horror and economic hardship is intriguing in and of itself, but the film does absolutely nothing with it. While Spielberg’s conceptualization of the ignorant suburban family’s financial comfort made thematic sense in tying it to the desecration of hallowed ground and the capitalist impulse to make profit at any social or cultural or spiritual expense, this new Poltergeist simply presents fiscal hardship as an issue that is causing familial tension and leaves it at that. The source of the haunting is still the same, but now there is no real connection.

Eric and Amy have three children: teenager Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), who is pretty and shallow and obsessed with her cell phone; preteen Griffin (Kyle Catlett), who is awkward and anxious; and six-year-old Madison (Kennedi Clements), who is bright and cheerful. Griffin is the only one of the children who has any real depth, and his inherent nervousness makes the predicament of living in a haunted house all the more distressing. Like the Freelings in the Spielberg/Hooper original, the first signs of the poltergeist intrusion are taken as harmless bits of inexplicable fun (grab the closet doorknob and watch your hair stand on end!), but things start getting nasty quickly, which is a central part of the new film’s problem. Most likely in a bid to speed things up for the perceived attention-addled audience, we get virtually no time with the Bowens before bad things start happening, which keeps us from identifying with them as characters, rather than just cardboard victims. There are some decent stabs at character development, including Eric’s pathetic attempt to cheer everyone up by spending money they don’t have, but it all feels wasted because nothing ever connects. Poltergeist is a film of dangling narrative strands and thematic ideas that never cohere.

Those who remember the first film will recognize many of the same situations and scenarios: innocent little Griffin touching the TV set and telling us “they’re here,” the creepy clown doll that the poltergeists turn homicidal, the ancient tree outside Griffin’s window that takes on a life of its own, the supernatural abduction of Madison and her imprisonment in another dimension within the house’s walls, the family’s reaching out to a group of paranormal researchers (here embodied by Jane Adams’s frumpy Dr. Brooke Powell) before finally resorting to an eccentric medium. Some of the new film’s twists on the original movie’s ideas work, especially the old tree, which Kenan stages not outside a window, but above a skylight, so that the branches waving in a thunderstorm look like they are purposefully trying to break through the glass right above poor Griffin’s bed. Other twists don’t work, especially Jared Harris’s medium, a reality TV star named Carrigan Burke who “cleans” haunted houses with a bunch of mumbo jumbo in his Scottish brogue. He is a pale shadow next to Zelda Rubenstein’s fascinating Tangina, who was utterly convincing as a woman truly in tune with the spiritual world. However, the worst step is its reworking of the film’s final moments, which in the original were a brilliantly inspired bit of gallows humor that was simultaneously funny and sad. Here it is just a silly goof-off leading to a bad rock song over the end credits. The film seems to be suggesting, in the end, that everything is just a big joke, which fatally misreads the original’s uncanny mix of charm and terror.

And, of course, like every horror movie remake, this Poltergeist has to show us more than the first one did, which basically amounts to a lot of mediocre computer-generated images of a hellish netherworld of writhing bodies that looks exactly like every other hellish netherworld we’ve already seen. That Spielberg and Hooper were able to convey so much more wonder and terror with flashing lights inside a closet is testament to the power of suggestion over banal literalness. Kenan, who previously helmed the excellent computer-animated Monster House (2006)—which Spielberg executive produced—is clearly a talented filmmaker, but all that feels wasted on this anemic effort to punch up a 33-year-old film that still works plenty well on its own.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (1.5)




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