Saturday 11 June 2016

Poltergeist (2015)

"Well, it's not like it was an ancient tribal burial ground.."

Meh. It's not that this film is badly made- it looks slick, is stylish and is well acted in a naturalistic style that Sam Rockwell excels at in particular. It just doesn't work as a horror film. At all.

As I've said many times before, I dislike sequels. And, as my wife pointed out during our viewing of this film, it's true that the slick look of so many modern horror films destroys all atmosphere and suspense in favour of a kind of music video arty cleverness; even the clown isn't scary.

The film goes through the plot motions of the original films but, while nothing is bad, and there's a genuinely brilliant scene involving a drill, well, Zelda Rubinstein has been replaced by Jared Harris as a reality TV ghost hunter and the directorial style, while slick, lacks the emotional manipulative was of Spoelberg which, while often annoying, makes the proper version of Poltergeist work.

This is a pointless remake. A shame; if they'd just made an original film about poltergeists they'd have saved themselves the awkward comparison.

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