Ok, I know I’m risking the wrath of many a dopers, but I am going to voice the unspeakably heretical opinion that the original Poltergeist was…not a great movie. OK film, not terrible mind you, but not the stone-cold classic that its reputation suggest. It just doesn’t live up to the hype.
The movie has a clever gimmick - take the hoariest old chestnut of Gothic horror (the haunted house story) and transpose it to shiny, new, modern California suburbia. But the film doesn’t really delve into its premise in any interesting way. In fact, the movie’s plot is actually paper thin - family moves into house, finds out it’s haunted, try to drive out the demons but when they can’t THEY move out. The story could be condensed into a five minute youtube video if you cut out all the (frankly dated) SFX. In fact, the movie is very much a pre-cursor of the CGI crapfests that folks complain about today. It’s pretty much all whiz-bang effect after whiz-bang effect.
The tragic early deaths of the actresses who played the two daughters is indeed sad. But would anybody remember these two girls today if they hadn’t died so young? The teenage girl was so forgettable that I can’t even remember anything about her from the film (I just remember the news reports of her getting killed by her boyfriend IRL.)
Not saying this movie flat out sucked, it was entertaining enough when I saw it at 13. But really, the few times in intervening years that I’ve seen in on cable, I found myself switching it off quickly. It just doesn’t hold up as a ‘classic’ like “the Shining”, “Halloween” or “the Exorcist.”
That said, I kind of have an antipathy for Sam Rockwell. Something about him annoys the hell out of me. I probably wouldn’t watch the remake because of him. But am I annoyed that they remade this no-brainer summer popcorn flick at all? Nope.
We watched poltergeist as a family when it came on the over the air HBO rig cable television deprived Brooklyn suffered through. The whole family watched, including my grandmother and father. Until that time I had never seen my dad demonstrate any fear whatsoever, but that movie changed it. When that monster came out of the wall toward the end of the film, 7 people of various ages in that living room screamed like teenaged girls. Brilliant! The film gave my brother nightmares and while I know some of you will be rolling your eyes in skepticism, it made our slightly haunted house even scarier.
I used to sing the music to my brother while were laying in bed to spook him out. And no clown of any sort was ever found in our house again. Good times!
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Yeah, what is it about him? He bugs me too for some reason I can’t put my finger on. Moon is the only movie I liked him in, and that still took great effort to get over the fact that it was him.
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Poltergeist was great in its time, but I’m not sure it would stand out today among a lot of other PG/PG-13 horror flicks. There weren’t that many PG horror movies back then. Maybe the new one will be successful just based on nostalgia.
