Laugh
out loud fun for all the family!
So
'Poltergeist' has been remade now, and it's hilarious. The elements
that are intentionally so usually aren't, but many of the serious
family drama scenes totally are. The pacing is awkward, with lots of
little horror shorts between the family comedy scenes, and the mood
changes back and forth so often that I was never really sure how to
feel. I think it needed a re-edit, as while it sticks to the basic
plot of the original, the humorous family parts are played up and the
ghost parts are presented in that current style (time of writing is
mid-2017) of jump scares and loud bursts of noise, and the result is
an uneven film that felt like it was going through puberty or
something.
I
think part of the problem was the casting of Sam Rockwell as the dad.
I really like Rockwell. He's almost always fantastic in whatever he's
in, but here he kind of takes over the movie with how likeable and
endearing he is. The rest of the cast did pretty well too (I quite
liked the Mad-Eye Moody style ghost hunter character in particular),
but especially during the first half it felt like the Sam Rockwell
show and I was rooting for him as he tried to keep his family happy
and get a new job at dinner parties.
The
first inclination of silliness was the way the comics were stacked
up. In the original the mum turns away and off camera the crew
stacked up the chairs silently, in this one the kid turns around and
an annoying stinger cord plays and the animated comic books blow
apart. The original went all bonkers too, but far more competently
and without the flashy effects. An exception is the ghostly world; it
was hellish and wispy and full of twisted flailing bodies and I liked
it. It reminded me of 'The Triumph of Death', and while I think it
was a smart move for the original to not show the other side at all,
I don't mind that they did so in this one.
A
note on the kids though - why do all movie teenagers have to be so
annoying? Taking other people I knew at that age, about 10% were as
annoying as about 80% are in film. I also didn't like the mums
reaction to the boy finding a bone in the garden. Did she think it
was dirty or something? It was clearly old enough to be long free of
meat, so it's no more dirty than the rest of the ground, and this was
before they knew they were living on an ex-cemetery (and even if they
knew it was a human bone - so what?) By that age the kid should
already have a small collection (not necessarily of human bones).
Poltergeist: 37.5