'Poltergeist' (2015) Review

The Family Friendly Poltergeist

BY IAN TAN

 

"The CGI people are coming"

            Remakes. Remakes everywhere. Sigh. As much as we’d hate to admit it, there may come a time where Hollywood just won’t be releasing any more original material. Every major blockbuster this year is either a sequel, reboot, shared universe release, or all three. Well, it’s been like that for many years now but it’s the most noticeable today. With original films such as Tomorrowland bombing at the box office, Hollywood’s descend to only making films that have an existing fan-base isn’t a far cry away. Sorry, Brad Bird; I guess Hollywood doesn’t have any new ideas.

            Enter 2015’s Poltergeist, a remake that’ll probably make kids show-off that they’ve sat through a horror movie (because it’s really not that scary) and/or make teens or adults who did watch the original wallow up in disappointment at how this remake just isn’t better than the original, because it’s just not. It tries to be, but overall, it mostly underwhelms and leaves viewers feeling somewhat shortchanged.

            The plot remains true to the original – the youngest daughter in the family is kidnapped by supernatural entities and is taken into their insidious realm that leave her family members seeking out help to rescue her from The Further  said realm; a premise already made modern with James Wan’s Insidious, which really is this generation’s Poltergeist and a proper throwback to it.

 

The lights are...alivee!

            Before getting to the downsides of this film, let’s take a look at the ups. Sam Rockwell, who plays the father in the family, does a good job in his role. The way his character was written to be struggling financially is also a nice addition to the character and makes him more relatable than the father in the original film, played by Craig T. Nelson. On top of that, the child actors here have more to do than the ones in the original did and give the film more characters to follow. It seems that, like Steven Spielberg himself, director Gil Kenan is at his directorial best when directing children, even if the child actors aren’t the best actors around. I quite liked Maddison’s (the youngest child) brother Griffin played by Kyle Catlett. On another note, one scene involving a drill and a hole in the wall was interesting to see, and added something new to the remake. The comedy is hit-or-miss, but most of the jokes conjured up a chuckle or two in me. 

Fun fact: That tall guy in the back was in Disney's Sky High

            On the downside however, Gil Kenan’s Poltergeist fails at nearly every level when trying to provide it share of scares. Setting has always played a major role in horror movies. The environment in which the characters live in can do so much to give the audience an eerie feeling about things, but the house in this movie just really isn’t scary. Furthermore, quite a number of the scares happen in broad daylight and add little to the scare factor of the movie. Save for that one scene with the drill, nothing else really stood out in terms of the terror this movie should be leaving us with.

The first Poltergeist, although a PG-rated horror film, left audiences terrified of everyday things like trees, clowns and (oh, boy) television. This 2015 version doesn’t. In fact, so many of the scares in this film are executed in an almost …fun… and family friendly way… and that’s totally not what they should be going for. Poltergeist wasn’t meant to be a kiddie horror film. Granted, the original had some kid-like scares (that smoky, cartoony hand that emerged from the TV), but it also had some really chilling moments (the maggots in the meatloaf, that guy peeling his face off). And the overuse of CGI in this remake, and bad CGI at that, makes things even less frightening. Everything in this remake that pays tribute to the original was done better in the original, i.e. the moving tree, the dead corpses, that toy clown, furniture moving on its own. This movie is filled with a terrible over-reliance on CGI to bring the scares to life, when so many of the scares in this film could have been achieved with practical effects like they were in the original.

Told ya they were alive, kid. Oh well. 

Like the disappointing Annabelle last year, Poltergeist (2015)’s poster proves to be scarier than the actual film. Was the budget compromised? Did the studio choose to fund the movie less knowing that people would come see it anyway? Gil Kenan did a pretty good job with Monster House back in 2006, so I’m sure he’d be able to make this movie a better one if he had better production values and a slightly bigger budget. At the end of the day, I would recommend this movie for families more than anyone else. Other moviegoers, be it people who’ve seen the 1982 film, horror buffs or teenagers, will likely be disappointed. It’s a great introductory horror film for kids; I’ll give it that.

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Final Verdict

Poltergeist gets 5.5 out of 10 stars – They don’t know what scares you.