Back when I was a kid, the original Poltergeist scared the living crap out of me. Curiosity got the better of me this year and I decided to check out the remake. Did it hold up?
Eric and Amy Bowen, along with their three kids, Kendra, Griffin, and Madison have just moved into a new house. It’s a nice little house in the burbs, and though the kids aren’t exactly keen on it, it’s a good house for a family. Everyone moves into their rooms, and things immediately become strange. Madison is talking to people she calls “The Lost” in her closet, Griffin finds a closet full off old clown dolls (along with a rogue squirrel) and there are weird electrical issues all over.
Eric has been laid off from his job and Amy is a stay at home mom/writer. The house was the best they could do in a new town once Eric lost his job. One night, when Eric and Amy go over to a friend’s house to have dinner, things at their home go from weird and quirky to scary and downright terrible. In the midst of a bad thunder storm the kids are attacked by clowns, beaten by living trees, almost swallowed by “something” in the garage, and sucked into a different dimension. When Eric and Amy arrive home to find the house in utter chaos, they have no real choice but to turn to the authorities… on the paranormal.
As far as remakes go, especially of horror movies, this one isn’t that bad. Maybe it’s because I don’t get scared easily anymore by horror, maybe it’s because I’m an adult, maybe it’s because I knew generally how the movie was going to go, but it didn’t creep me out as much as the original. Or maybe it was that I kept waiting for Eric to yell “hama kavula!” through the whole thing? I don’t know. What I really did enjoy was how they updated the technology in this versus the original. The use of cellphones, flat screen tvs, and clown technology was better. The hands on the other side of the tv was probably the only part that actually was pretty creepy, now that I think about it.
The rest of the film is well put together. The acting, writing, and even the casting was decent enough. The little girl that plays Madison was every bit as eerie as Heather O’Rourke in the 80s. My only hope is that this film isn’t “cursed” as the first film is said to be, for the safety of all that were involved. The story itself wasn’t changed much, and the setting is still basically the same, making this “remake” almost the very definition of the word. If only Craig T. Nelson had been in there somewhere. It’s not a movie that will give me nightmares like the original did, but it’s close enough to the source material that it may just scare a new generation of kids into throwing their clown dolls in the trash. Seriously, eff that clown, man.
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